Carl A. Zimring, We Ignore Our Infrastructure at Our Peril

09/20/2010 02:21 PM

formerly http://www.hnn.us/articles/131459.html

now:https://web.archive.org/web/20111205135536/http://www.hnn.us/articles/131459.html

Railroads, As Well.

One might add railroads to the list of important  infrastructure. For example, last June  (2009), there was a derailment in Rockford, Illinois,  on the Canadian National railroad(former Illinois Central track), involving a train carrying more than  10,000 tons of grain alcohol from Iowa to a refinery  in Chicago,  where it would have been  used as an additive  to  make  gasoline. There seems to have been a washout, which caused the track  to  give way under  the last  eighteen cars, and the resulting fire involved more than a  thousand tons of fuel.  One person  was  killed,  others were injured, and there were sizable  evacuations from  what was,  after all, potentially a Hiroshima-sized  event. It  could have been  far  worse  if it had happened in a town center or a city, perhaps even inside Chicago.  My understanding is  that local law-enforcement gave  the railroad  some  kind of warning  that a washout  had  taken place,  but  that the railroad did not act  on  it.  The question, still unresolved, is "what did  the  train dispatcher  know, and when  did  he  know  it?"

There are specialized alarms which can be  built  into the track-bed to warn of derailment conditions, and to cause them to indicate automatically in the railroad's computerized train-dispatching  system,  but these are specialized equipment  and correspondingly  expensive (eg. $1000 for a very simple device,  the equivalent of a smoke  detector), and one needs large numbers of  such devices, say a hundred or two hundred to the  mile,  not to mention the  installation expense.

A further complicating factor was that the  CEO of Canadian National, E. Hunter Harrison,  had formed the habit of logging on to the dispatching computer from home, late at  night, and electronically looking over the dispatchers' shoulders. He would call up the dispatching center and start barking orders, over the  telephone, at the hapless desk man. This may well have  contributed to a  mentality of  "...run the trains through, hell or high water, and never mind the Police/Fire Department reports."
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Katie Backman,   Matt Williams,  Anna Voelker,   David Shultz and Corina Curry, "Train derails: Woman dead; 600 families remain evacuated," Rockford [Ill.] Register-Star, Jun 19, 2009 [ update Jun 22, 2009]


[unretrievable even with wayback machine]
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Thomas V. Bona, "Feds’ accident report on derailment likely early in 2011", Rockford [Ill.] Register-Star, Jun 18, 2010


[unretrievable even with wayback machine] -----------------------------------------------------
"Train derailment timeline," Rockford [Ill.] Register-Star, Jun 18, 2010



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"Train derailment anniversary: Lessons from ‘the big one’," Rockford [Ill.] Register-Star, Jun 19, 2010



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"One dead in fiery Rockford train derailment," Associated  Press,  June 20, 2009


now: https://web.archive.org/web/20090625174528/http://www.chicagobreakingnews.com/2009/06/rockford-train-derailment-causes-evacuations.html
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Hunter_Harrison
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http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/68626.html

[no other comment but mine]

Lincoln and Technology

There is an interesting article in a recent issue of Trains Magazine.

Peter A. Hansen, The Rail Splitter and the Railroads: Abraham Lincoln's vision helped determine what American railroading would  become, and what  kind of nation it  would serve, Trains, Feb. 2009 , pp.28-39.

Hansen talks about the fact that  Lincoln was a railroad lawyer: "Lincoln participated in suits involving 13 different railroads, defending them 79 times and opposing them on 63 occasions." (p. 32). In the Effie Afton case of 1856, involving a steamboat which had collided with the Rock Island bridge across the Mississippi, with an ensuing fire which put both out of commission, Lincoln was obliged to handle an essentially technical negligence case. In 1859, as an undeclared presidential candidate, he managed to have himself briefed by Grenville M. Dodge who had been out west surveying the route  for a transcontinental railroad. In 1863, Lincoln reestablished contact with Dodge, now a Union brigadier-general, to consult with him about railroad matters.  Dodge eventually became the chief engineer of the Union Pacific Railroad, with a direct line to Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman in case of difficulties. In short, Lincoln was quite thoroughly plugged into the leading emergent technology of his day. He was not altogether  unique in that respect. Robert E. Lee had  given engineering  advice for the Rock Island Bridge prior to its construction, and the  United States Military Academy was one of the two  major sources of civil engineers in the Early Republic, the  other  being the Erie Canal project.

I cannot think of any modern national politician who is involved with  technology at  anything like Lincoln's level. Even Albert Gore has not gone  much beyond general boosterism.  Considering Lincoln as a lawyer, the closest modern parallel I can think of would  be David Boies, who, far from being a presidential candidate, has  been investigated by his state bar association.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Boies

http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1085069393915
[dumps to journal home page, not retrievable on wayback machine]

Similarly, the one lawyer I can think of who has written most intelligently about aviation is F. Lee Bailey, but of course Bailey's reputation was primarily based on defending  gruesome killers of one kind of another, and if he had tried to enter electoral politics, that would have come back to haunt him.

On the contrary, one of the enduring realities of our own time is that the major organs of government are usually dangerously uninformed on technological matters, and tend to blindly follow the advice of the usual lobbyists, without being able to relate technological issues to traditional issues of public policy. Granted, Barrack H. Obama's decisions on technological matters are a bit better than those of John S. McCain, but one suspects that to be mostly a matter of age, in the sense that Obama must have formed many of his "unexamined presuppositions" circa 1980, rather than circa 1960. We can see this more clearly in the case of former Sen Ted Stevens, arguably the single most misguided senator on current  technology issues, famed for his remark  about  "the internet being a series of tubes," which was treated as a general  excuse among engineers to regard the Senate as a laughing stock.  The central fact about Stevens was that he was born in 1923, and formed his "unexamined presuppositions" circa 1940, that by 1980, he was of an age and status at which most  men do not casually learn from their environment very much. If you have a secretary who listens to your oral  ruminations and conjectures, and writes them up into polished drafts, you are not going to learn to use a word processor, or to surf the internet, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Stevens

Incidentally Hansen reproduces a wickedly funny contemporary cartoon of  Lincoln  sneaking through pro-south Baltimore on his way to  Washington, DC. Abe looks at once sinister and terrified, intimidated by a yowling tomcat.

formerly: http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/55267.html
                http://hnn.us/blogs/comments/55267.html#comment

now: https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/blog/55267

[Luker’s brief notice of articles, and my comment]

Owen Hatherley, "Dreams of leaving,"  New Statesman, 25 September 2008. Review of:
     Naked Airport by Alastair Gordon
   and
     Politics at the Airport Edited by Mark B Salter

now: https://web.archive.org/web/20080926222209/http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2008/09/naked-airport-gordon-politics

Airports Versus Train Stations.

As a matter of physics, airplanes cannot ultimately compete with trains for peaceable transportation. An airplane, like an off-road vehicle such as a jeep, is a machine for going where you haven't been properly invited. What is happening in Europe is that railroads are in  the process of driving airplanes out. The trains are getting  steadily faster, but the airplanes cannot do so without producing sonic booms.  One recent event has been the opening of the new Berlin train station, more or less consciously designed to be an anti-airport.

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Here are some recent interesting items:

Benjamin B. Bachman,  "Jake's World: Visit Seattle's gritty realm near  King Street Station (Secrets of an Urban Terminal)," Trains Magazine, March 2007. A sentimental look at "Urban Railroad Space," the zone around an American train station which incorporates bars, brothels, flophouses, soup kitchens, and bail bondsmen. The pictures are all taken in the Pacific Northwest's six-month rainy season.

R. David Read, "Reunited: And in Berlin's new Central Station, it feels so good," Trains Magazine, September 2008. The new station is built in the reclaimed no-mans-land of the Berlin Wall, at the heart of the city, with trains arriving through tunnels and on viaducts. It is a structure of five different levels, two of them train platforms, with a shopping mall and office space built around them. As well as the usual fast-food franchises, it apparently contains a supermarket, presumably for commuters shopping on their way home. However the station also handles long-distance trains.

Scott Lothes, "Busiest Station in the World: Shinjuku Station keeps the masses moving through Tokyo," Trains Magazine, August 2008. People scurrying back and forth in tunnels between gigantic buildings, in something out of a dystopian science-fiction epic, but a couple of teenage street musicians have "stolen" a venue, and are playing South American folk music on the sidewalk.
 
Matt Van Hatten, "Continental Drifter: Uncovering Europe's latest surprises on a three wee trip with  83 trains, 37 transit systems,and at least 50 cups of coffee," Trains Magazine, November 2008. An overview of new projects.

I'm afraid this material is not available online, at least, not to nonsubscribers-- Trains Magazine tends to be a bit backwards about doing internet stuff.

RE: http://hnn.us/articles/47020.html

now: https://web.archive.org/web/20111212031542/http://hnn.us/articles/47020.html

[2 comments visible, the rest lost, mine included]

De-Globalization Does Not Mean Putting the Clock Back.

One must not make too much of European  trade barriers in the  late nineteenth century. A case can be made that they tended to be leaky. They did not  put the clock back. Their beneficiaries were still likely to be the most relatively impoverished people in the land-- who remained impoverished.

I think you would probably find that trade barriers to agricultural imports in the late nineteenth century did  not include guano. Guano imports were on the order of at least pounds per capita by the 1870's. The effect of cheap guano was to supercharge existing European farms. Similarly, oceanic fishing (and whaling) does not technically constitute importing, no matter how far  the fishermen  range. Steam-powered fishing trawlers were being introduced, with the expected economies. Just before the First World War, kippers, that is, herring  fillets, were notoriously a poor man's dinner. The inedible, or rather,  unpalatable fraction of the fish harvest was apt to get used as fertilizer; or else, animal feed, and then fertilizer. In particular, hogs were notoriously fed on whatever garbage was available. Interestingly, the modern nitrate fertilizer process, invented by the German chemist Fritz Haber, was employed during the First World War to replace the fertilizer  supplies which had been cut off by the British Navy, in  the same way that the United States was forced to develop synthetic rubber in the Second World War after the Japanese had overrun Southeast  Asia. It would also be worth  looking into "Liebig Extract" (sometimes called "drippings"), and similar low-grade meat  products, which might actually be economic byproducts of leather production. Likewise, there were early forms of agricultural mechanization. In late nineteenth century England, stationary steam engines with winches and cables  were sometimes  used to haul agricultural  implements up and down the fields.

Also, one must deal with the idea of redirected internal trade. In the eighteenth  century, the most developed portions of Northern Europe, England and the Netherlands, were importing  foodstuffs and other raw materials such as forest  products from the more backwards areas, such as the  Baltic. Danzig, for example, was a famous grain-exporting  port. The English "Corn Laws" in the early nineteenth  century reduced imports to about ten percent of total consumption, but that ten percent was a safety valve in times of possible shortage or political disorder. But of course, the Corn Laws were eventually abolished, about the time that many continental nations were instituting their own equivalents. The East-Elbian region of Germany, adjoining the Baltic behind Danzig, Stettin, and Koenigsberg, was Germany's breadbasket, but it was also the German  equivalent of the  American Deep South. German grain exports worked pretty  much like American cotton exports, that is, they were based around a system of de jure or de facto  unfree labor, in a general climate of cultural backwardness. Once Germany was unified, the central government provided subsidies to this conspicuously impoverished region, but the results were generally unsuccessful. Since the East Elbian region's habitual market  was England, there were obviously severe limits on the extent to which it could be aided by protectionism. Protectionism was only a consolation prize. By contrast, the characteristic agricultural export of South Germany was named vintage wines.

 Finally, the backwards agrarian regions of the various countries tended to produce far more than their share of emigrants to America, thus permitting the consolidation and rationalization of farmlands. This was most clearly visible in Ireland, whose population  fell from about  nine million just before the potato famine to about three million, circa 1900. Perhaps a million people starved, but the rest emigrated. It has been pointed out that in the nineteenth century, emigration functioned as the economic equivalent of free trade. People went where the food was, instead of the food coming to them, and they sent  back remittances as well. This also had the effect of bypassing American industrial tariffs.

Summing up,  the effect of agricultural tariffs was not to put the clock back, but merely to channel and shape Globalism.  European farmers tended to get first  use of agricultural imports, or the imports were directed to low-income consumers whom the farmers did not consider prime customers. It is significant that grain was the point of conflict, because, given the technology of the time, grain was about the only commodity of mass consumption which could be shipped across an ocean, and still be a first-class commodity. The various kinds of canned meat products, canned vegetables, etc were obviously inferior, and fit only to make stew (*). Eventually, the mechanization of European agriculture more or less caught up with that of American agriculture. A type of "Saturday farmer" emerged, with both a tractor, and an industrial job on the  weekdays. This can  be seen in its highest form  in Japan, oddly enough.

(*) Of course, our modern post-scarcity mindset is that the epicure eats an extraordinary variety of traditional poor people's cooking: Italian Pizza, Mexican Chili, Indian Curry, the assorted varieties of Chinese cooking, etc., etc.

To maintain the volume of international trade in the face of improved methods of production, international trade has to be constantly re-invented. In the 1950's salad greens were grown in certain favored valleys of California, and special express trains loaded at special stations in the middle of the lettuce fields, before heading off to the east coast. By now, of course, these favored valleys have mostly been built over with housing developments. Fresh salad tended to be more expensive then. I found, in an issue of Trains magazine, a collection of reproductions of old railroad dining car advertisements. It seems that  about  the middle of the twentieth century, the  salad component of the fixed-price lunch on the premium transportation mode of the day was a glass of tomato juice-- presumably canned or bottled. Nowadays,  that would be simply unsalable. No restaurant at the Howard Johnson's level can  get by without  a salad bar.  Even allowing for a captive audience, the airlines serve salad, not tomato juice. The green goods are often flown in by jet from South America.

At a certain level of technological development, manufacturing  becomes trivial, ie. Arthur C. Clarke's postulated "universal replicator." Short of that level, robots are becoming of ever-increasing  importance. If a high tariff is placed on automobiles, Toyota will simply use more robots at factories in America, and other Asian automakers will follow its example. New automobile factories will be built in places like rural Texas, not in Detroit. The firms building the factories will be legally separate and distinct from the American "Big Three," and, as such, will have no obligations to the vast majority of existing American autoworkers. What is true for automobiles is even more true for electronics. Certain very advanced industries, notably chemical refineries and telephone company plant, are so automated that they can go on functioning  normally during a strike. Most of the remaining workers do things quite remote from the  production line, and the effect of withdrawing their labor might  not appear for a year or two. In fact, it may very well be that most of the workers do things sufficiently remote from actual production that their economic value is conjectural rather than provable.  Automobile and electronics manufacturing, and that of kindred manufacture, might well reach this point soon. By analogy with agriculture, one might reach a stage where the developed countries were self-sufficient in large classes of manufactures, but this manufacturing did not employ  more than one percent of the labor force, and prices for manufactured goods were correspondingly low. What could possibly happen is that invention might fail, that new imported goods and services might not come along to replace the ones which are being  automated out of existence.

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now:
https://country-studies.com/peru/history-of-the-economy.html

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The New Werner Twentieth Century Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica: A Standard Work of Reference in Art, Literature, Science, History, Geography, Commerce, Biography, Discovery and Invention, Volume 11,  Werner Company, 1907, article on Guano

http://books.google.com/books?id=EhAEAAAAYAAJ&pg=RA1-PA207&lpg=RA1-PA207&dq=guano+imports+europe&source=web&ots=NMLMrJ5Qcl&sig=Shums-jm1qcowZJKHNRkxC5_79s
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JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER, Marx's ecology in historical perspective, Issue 96 of INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISM JOURNAL Published Winter 2002

formerly: http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj96/foster.htm

now: https://web.archive.org/web/20030813222023/http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj96/foster.htm
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1911 Britannica article: Fisheries.

formerly: http://encyclopedia.jrank.org/FAT_FLA/FISHERIES.html

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/35606/pg35606-images.html

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Hank Wangford, Cowboys: From Patagonia to the Alamo, Orion Books 1966, extract: "We thought 'Fray Bentos' was Spanish for corned beef: A history of El Anglo at Fray Bentos. In this extract the author and his fellow traveller, Joe Tambien arrive in Fray Bentos to be given a tour of the meat processing plant, El Anglo, by Eduardo Irigoyen."

formerly : http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/casamirror/fray_bentos.htm

https://web.archive.org/web/20080521111522/http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/casamirror/fray_bentos.htm
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Appleton's Annual Cyclopaedia and Register of Important Events of the Years, D. Appleton & Company, 1900 - Argentine Republic

http://books.google.com/books?id=mqwYAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA29&lpg=PA29&dq=imports+beef+europe+liebig&source=web&ots=l2SeqbC0pP&sig=IoXpbA7UGqvURKtoZmB07r6UjzM

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Janatha Fish Meal & Oil Products,About Fish Meal

formerly:  http://www.janathafishmeal.com/pages/fishmeal.htm

https://web.archive.org/web/20080426012130/http://www.janathafishmeal.com/pages/fishmeal.htm
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FOOD AND AGRICULTURE ORGANIZATION OF THE UNITED NATIONS, The Production of Fish Meal and Oil, FAO FISHERIES TECHNICAL PAPER - 142, Rome, 1986

https://www.fao.org/4/X6899E/X6899E00.HTM

Chapter 1, Introduction

http://www.fao.org/DOCREP/003/X6899E/X6899E02.htm

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Chikashi TAKAHASHI, The U.S. and European market and the emergence of traditional Japanese fish fertilizer as an export product during the interwar period, in Socio-Economic History Summany, Vol. 70, No. 2 [abstract only]

formerly: http://wwwsoc.nii.ac.jp/sehs/en/seh_e/sum/sum_e702.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20050319200803/http://wwwsoc.nii.ac.jp/sehs/en/seh_e/sum/sum_e702.html

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http://jas.fass.org/cgi/reprint/1931/1/88.pdf
[site  still missing on the wayback machine ]

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History of the Communities of the Peninsula

http://www.jasenbenwah.ca/piccadilly.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20080905064844/http://www.jasenbenwah.ca/piccadilly.html

in: Jasen Sylvester Benwah, compiler, Native settlements of Newfoundland, 2005

https://web.archive.org/web/20080520035743/http://www.jasenbenwah.ca/index2.htm
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASF

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world's Columbian Expositition of 1893, The Book of the Fair

http://columbus.iit.edu/bookfair/bftoc.html

Chapter the Thirteenth: Agriculture

http://columbus.iit.edu/bookfair/ch13.html

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Mary A. M. Marks, The Corn Laws: A Popular History,  A. C. Fifield, 1908

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=EwG61sjDRqkC&dq=%22corn+laws%22&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=WgA24peF2T&sig=k2gms8N0ax0DHA9jxNqmpR837Js

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_Laws
Properly cited and all, but makes the mistake that a quarter is a quarter-hundredweight  when a quarter of grain is actually a quarter-chaldron, or eight bushels. For wheat, this would be about five hundred pounds.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushel

RE: http://hnn.us/articles/32375.html

[one other comment, not retrievable]

Misunderstandings  Go Both Ways

I think one significant cultural difference is the notion of what one might call Ludic Production, the notion that making things is a worthy and honorable recreation.

The patron saints of ludic production were Louis XVI (the clockmaker) and Marie Antoinette (the shepherdess). They had both reached the point where consumption became absurdity. Even war, the traditional business of kings, was no longer as serious as it had once been. Louis XVI could not go off to Canada and fight for Detroit, nor could he go to India, and fight for Pondicherry, the way Louis XIV had gone and fought for Flanders a hundred years earlier. France's major rivalry was now maritime and  global, months of travel away from Paris. The most Louis XVI could do was to send off minor noblemen, of the professional adventurer type, such as Lafayette, and pay their bills. At the time, many of Louis XVI's contemporaries simply could not  understand what  he was about with his clockmaking, and he came in for a fair amount of derision. The courtiers, busily scrambling for places, could not deal with the idea of someone having nowhere further to go. Since the time of Louis XVI, ludic production has become widespread in the developed countries.

I have seen a certain amount of anecdotal evidence to the effect that educated Indians and Chinese, who could engage in ludic production if they wanted to, are simply unable to comprehend what ludic production is all about. This probably gives them an exaggerated idea of Americans' willingness to pay for things, and consequently, an exaggerated idea of the viability of an economy based on exporting consumer goods to the United States.  I doubt these Indians and Chinese have any real grasp of the social demographics of Wal-Mart. Indians and Chinese tend to understand the United States only in material terms, not in spiritual terms, and of course this means that in the last analysis, they tend to misunderstand what the  United States will do and why. 

One implication of ludic production is that producer goods are also consumer goods. The ludic producer covets "heavy iron." A steam locomotive is heavy iron. So is a Boeing 747. So, twenty-five years ago, was the kind of computer which filled an entire room, say an IBM 370/3081. And so is a computerized metal-shaping machine which can produce other machines from blueprints. The ludic producer admires the kind of production machinery being  used by the  largest corporations, and by the government itself, and, if at all  possible, desires to own something of comparable sophistication himself. One implication is that there is an enormous premium on "re-inventing" expensive production machines as inexpensive consumer goods,  and this tends to drive the state of production machines far beyond what orthodox industrial economics would dictate. To put this in concrete terms, a suburban householder with  a houselot of an acre may very well go out and buy a lawn tractor, costing, with all imaginable accessories, several thousand dollars. This tractor is powerful enough to do a tolerably efficient job of cultivating a farm of a hundred acres, if used by a full-time farmer. Of course, to be economically employed as a full-time farmer in the United States, you need about a million dollars worth of land, and in that case, you buy a much bigger tractor.

At a certain point, the acknowledged proprietors of the heavy iron, the corporations and the government, find it advantageous to use consumer production equipment. This equipment may not be as durable as heavy iron, but it is much cheaper, and easily replaced. This changeover  point has been reached in computers, and the result is that some of the most exemplary and admired computer experts are fourteen-year-old boys. The next stage of progress involves manufacturing machines. Once a machine is successfully "ludicized," it is likely to have costs equivalent to a human wage of about a penny an hour.

If  the machine can do a task at all, and if machine output is considered as good as hand output by the ultimate consumer, it is futile for the third-world producer to strive for cheaper wages, because the machine will ultimately drive him below literal starvation point, and  that probably  in a  very few years.  From the third-world producer's point of view, this is rather like dealing with a sort of techno-jihadi, someone bent on destroying the producer for ideological reasons, who is not open to discussion. Of course, the promoters of technology are not actually fanatics--  they are simply Americans behaving reasonably for Americans.

There are three well-defined types of products which account for a widely disproportionate share of imports: automobiles, electronics, and clothing. They each have peculiar characteristics which prevent them from being "mass-produced fifty-year durables." For example, a frying pan is both inexpensive, due to mass  production, and lasts practically forever,  Wal-Mart has to price its frying pans in competition with the local Salvation  Army ("Sally Ann") store. A backwards country cannot build a viable export economy around frying pans. What makes automobiles distinctive is that the terrific strains of road-wear  cause them to break down in a fairly short period of time.  Electronics are distinctive for their rapid rate of technological change. Clothing is distinctive for  its extremely fragile character.

In the finer forms of electronics manufacturing, human workers are essentially counterproductive. Human workers breathe, and it is difficult to prevent their breath from contaminating the product. Hand  labor is marginalized to the coarser sorts of packaging tasks. Making electronics better inevitably means squeezing out more human labor.  Third-world countries, such as China, try very hard to develop electronics industries, for obvious reasons. They are willing to  pay what amounts to full tuition, and depending how shrewd they are, they may or may not get cheated, palmed off with something which does not give them an autonomous electronics industry. I suspect the Vietnamese are more of "country cousins" than the Chinese, and are more likely to get clipped.

The automobile industry, as the premier mechanical consumer goods industry, is in the process of increasing its electronics content, both in the sense that automobiles contain more electronic components and fewer mechanical ones, and also in  the sense that automobiles are manufactured with more robots and fewer assembly-line workers.  The auto industry is chronically insolvent, which means that this modernization takes place at a snail's pace. The attraction of moving production to a third-world country is that the firm can just move the  machinery  (not buy new), and reduce its labor costs, without having to go through the pains of modernization. Such a firm _can_ use  the proceeds to build highly modernized plants in a developed country, but the nature of such firms is that they are  much more likely to spend the money on something other than industrial investment in their core industry. Thus far, I am speaking  about automakers in their own countries of citizenship.  The Japanese firms in North  American are a special case. They labor under the disability of being foreigners, and  they are therefore obliged to carry corporate citizenship to a level which American firms are not obliged to match. Hence the Japanese firms go in for "extreme automation,"  in  one form or another. Having produced this automation, they are  under pressure to license it to American automakers, or even to sell components (such as engines, transmissions, etc.) based on it. 

As for political stewardship, you have to remember that there are large areas of business which move so fast that it's a case of 100% return on investment or nothing. Take fashion-driven clothing, for example,-- the manufacturer times it to coincide with an event, such as the release of a movie. Within a few weeks, it's either sold or remaindered. Similarly, for electronics, a production machine has to pay for itself within the year, or it never will, what with  technological obsolescence and Moore's Law. After the premium -price window has expired,  it doesn't greatly matter from a  business standpoint who winds up in physical possession of the manufacturing equipment. Of course, it can be argued plausibly that Moore's Law is itself a fashion process ("My computer is bigger and badder than your computer, you weenie, you weenie, you weenie!"). In many cases, the manufacturing operation performed in a third-world country is one which the manufacturer does not expect to be performing at all, anywhere in the world, in two or three year's time. Long-term political considerations do not count for very much, under those circumstances. Bear in mind that manufacturing as a whole is a declining sector. The fact that a firm is manufacturing  in the third world implies that it does not have  a government subsidy connection in a developed country-- the equivalent of Being  Paid Not to Grow Alfalfa.

In the United States, the military is the major  agency of a certain type of stewardship, not precisely political, in something of the  same sense that the Boy  Scouts are not  precisely political. The military worries about a whole series of things like the decline of craftsmanship. The military also worries about economic independence. There are limits to what the military can do, of course. It cannot impose trade barriers, or create massive job losses in the United States, or do anything likely to increase the price of major  consumer goods in the short run (Sematech, circa 1990, was a major blunder). However, the military can work around the edges. Suppose that at some point, the United States Army decides that it is worried about  the supply of automobiles and trucks for its own use. Strictly speaking, a rational economist might invite the military to lay down stockpiles, but of course that is  not what the military will do.  What the military will do is to push developments  in automation, especially general-purpose automation, as distinct from the special-purpose automation normally used on assembly lines. The military will be be  willing to back up its concerns to the tune of five or ten billion dollars, which is not really a very large sum by Pentagon standards.  This money will be used to pioneer things like new kinds of machine tools, much more heavily computerized than those which are in general use at the present, and capable of operating in a much more versatile fashion.  The military would of course operate synergistically with the home craftsmen, and the calculatedly respectable Japanese automakers. Jointly and severally, these groups will present the global automobile  industry with a whole series of "offers it cannot refuse," in  much the same sense that, in the twentieth century, the automobile  industry presented the farmer with a whole series of  "offers he could not refuse." If the automobile industry has migrated all its labor to China anyway, then there are no real limits to the extent to which the military-hobbyist complex can push the automobile industry around.

All the more desirable export industries in the third world will collapse as fast as they arose, or at least their export markets will.  Possibly the export industries can be adapted  to the internal markets of their own  countries, possibly not.

04/27/2007 02:40 AM

RE: http://hnn.us/articles/37935.html

and comments:

Well,  Edwin Black is not the soberest of scholars, of course-- in many respects, he reminds me of David Noble. He has rather  overstated his case. However, there is a grain of truth within his argument.

For example, back in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, there were what were called Interurban Railroads,  essentially long-distance streetcars running between towns. Continuous Interurban networks ran across large sections of the Midwest. They were  not built to the same standard of construction as a mainline electric railroad, and they did not do long distance express trains or heavy freight. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_interurbans

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interurban

The automobile companies did do things like buying up streetcar companies and converting them to motor buses, but in fairness, the streetcar companies were part of the  electrical industry, ultimately backed up by firms such as General Electric and Westinghouse, and the electrical  industry played by the same hardball rules, eg. the Selden Patent. They  had their own racket,  in short.

Electric motors have two big comparative advantages over the internal combustion engine. One is that they  do not produce smoke, which makes them useful in tunnels. The other advantage is that electric motors have a lot of burst power, for climbing hills, and accelerating rapidly. Electricity shines either where it is necessary to go underground, or  in  mountains. Of course, mountains often pose the necessity for tunnels.

The northwestern railroads, those running from Minneapolis to  Seattle, viz, the Northern Pacific, the  Great Northern, and the Milwaukee Road (the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad), had to go through the  worst part of the Rockies, and then through the  Cascades. They dug  themselves some  long tunnels, most  notably the Cascade tunnel, and they build some tracks leading up steep grades. Two of the three, the Great Northern and the Milwaukee Road,  employed electric  locomotives, not over their whole length, but  over the difficult  portions of their lines where electrics gave special advantages. When they eventually switched to diesel, it was in  the context of  cutbacks and cost reductions, at a time when the airlines were eviscerating the railroads' most  upscale services. The capacity of the major tunnels is limited by smoke  considerations, and in some tunnels, the train crews are required to don gas masks before entering. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Northern_Railway_%28US%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milwaukee_Road

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Pacific_Railroad

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burlington_Northern_Railroad

The other notable electric railroad in the United States is of course the Northeast Corridor, together with its multiplicity of connected commuter railroads, many of them electric.

Now, as to economics, the progress of the  automobile,  aviation, and petroleum  industries in the twentieth century is obviously linked to the  military-industrial complex. By 1960, American railroads were economically moribund. Apart from the case of Europe, Russian, Swedish, Indian, South African, and Chilean railroad practice  suggests that the  United States could have gone a lot further with electrified railroads, if they had been made a priority.

RE: http://hnn.us/articles/140327.html

I  have to comment  that  Maury Klein's "How Did the Railroads Survive and Prosper?" reads like a Union Pacific corporate press release.  I looked Maury Klein up, and discovered that  his expertise  is primarily  nineteenth-century. That explains it, I suppose. I would suggest that you read Mark W. Hemphill's "The  Golden Empire Came Crashing  Down:  How Could Southern Pacific Fall  So  Fast" (Trains, March 2005,  pp.80-89) to get a  sense of what serious work on this subject  looks like. It is also worth reading the  various autobiographical writings of Linda Grant Niemann, who  spent  twenty years working for the Union Pacific and its predecessor, the Southern  Pacific, as a train crew-member. Things look rather different when you are standing on the ground in the  mud than they do when  you are sitting in a skyscraper office.

American railroads are not highly modernized. On the contrary, they have a critical deficit of computerization. Maury Klein does not seem to grasp that computers in the central office, by themselves, tend  to  merely generate  paper Potemkin Villages, as in the case of Union Pacific's 1996 traffic jam, or  "meltdown." According to  Linda Grant  Niemann, who  was on the ground at the time,  the "meltdown" looked  like classic Soviet  Stakhanovitism . That was a lesson many firms learned in the 1960's. The question to ask is how computers are connected  up at  the point of application.  According to that question, the point to note is that a freight car, costing about a hundred thousand  dollars, has no more electronics than a RFID tag. The car's brakes and couplers have to be set up manually, meaning that  someone has to walk  down a train  for a mile or more,  often standing between  the  cars, at risk of injury.  Very  few industries are quite that backwards.

The railroads are amenable to being  technologically upgraded with fairly  small expenditures, but, given their declining  markets, they are resistant to spending  money on anything. 

The freight railroads are heavily dependent on moving  very large shipments,  of at least  five thousand tons. They make their money from a handful of traffics where this is advantageous, the most notable being coal. Similarly, they move feed-grain, the lowest-quality agricultural product.  If a farmer should start grazing  cattle on his own land,  gaining the  ability to  sell the meat as "grass-fed," he would cease to  be a railroad customer. And  thirdly, the  railroads ship containers from China. With the exception of the China trade, the dominant connection of  the railroads is with declining industries, and  with the lowest-value segments of those industries.

RE: http://hnn.us/articles/7583.html

The Middle East and the American Automobile

One persistent thing  which is ignored in the whole discussion about the war, terrorism, etc., is oil. All the stories people tell about the Middle East devolve into lies because no one wants to talk about oil.  The largest chunk of oil (and all the "prime cuts") is used to make gasoline. Practically all gasoline is used to power automobiles. Solve the  automobile problem, and you solve the Middle East problem as an incidental byproduct.

The United States is a land-rich country. Making allowance for quality of land, we are even more land-rich than the Russians. Most of their vast area is Siberian tundra. Ours is the cornlands of Iowa and Ohio. When the United States becomes dependent on mineral resources from outside its own territory, that is a clinical symptom of addiction. The junkie never has enough, until he eventually kills himself with an overdose. Junkies are notorious for holding up stores to support their "habit." Some junkies  are more dangerous than other junkies-- for example, "meth" junkies ("speed", "crank") are more prone to paranoid behavior than opiate junkies. Ask yourself in all candor whether the cumulative behavior of the United States in the Middle East, going back to Mossadeq, is not the behavior of a junkie  in  paranoid  mode. There was a certain type of nineteenth-century domestic tragedy which ran as follows: The drunken husband did not work; he beat his wife, and molested his daughter. Eventually, the wife fed him rat poison, putting it in his whiskey, and, being caught, was hanged for murder. Does this not seem oddly familiar?

Oil and the Middle East are not the only problems associated with the  automobile. Automobile accidents kill about forty thousand Americans a year, about half of them in connections with drunken driving-- forms of addiction cluster together. There are all kinds of health, pollution, and ecological issues. We need to critically examine the role of the automobile in society.  Our leaders have not reached the ability to face the fact that we have an automobile problem.  At most, they merely want a technological  quick-fix. Air Force One is the American automobile in an almost comically exaggerated form, and the President is in no position to tell anyone not to drive a SUV. We need to look at the ways in which social and organizational structures "lock-in" the automobile. A wide range of giant buildings, such as skyscrapers and shopping malls are practically part of the "automobile system." If you control the excesses of the automobile, a byproduct will be to disperse potential terrorist targets.

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Some links on the cooking issue:


https://web.archive.org/web/20070906100231/http://lenz.unl.edu/wordpress/?p=33

(formerly http://lenz.unl.edu/wordpress/?p=33)

http://www.outyourbackdoor.com/article.php?id=1077

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http://academiccog.blogspot.com/2007/03/learning-to-cook.html

formerly http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/284645

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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/teaching-pupils-to-cook-risotto-and-crumble-will-tackle-obesity-927091.html

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http://www.allbusiness.com/retail-trade/eating-drinking-places/4174776-1.html
[no file<, not retrievable on wayback machine]

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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/nov/12/the-home-cooking-revival/

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Household electric appliance statistics: