Miscellaneous
Papers on the Automobile
various dates, 2004-2011
Andrew D. Todd
a_d_todd@rowboats-sd-ca.com
http://rowboats-sd-ca.com/
Items Commented On:
Carl A. Zimring, We Ignore Our
Infrastructure at Our Peril
Andrew Ferguson: If our 16th
president were alive today, chances are he wouldn't be Barack
Obama
Ralph E. Luker, Modern
History Notes, "Dreams of Leaving,"
Ronald Findlay and Kevin
H. O'Rourke, Is Globalization Here to Stay? (Maybe, Maybe
Not),
Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Kentucky Fried
Globalization
Edwin Black, Hitler's
Carmaker: The Inside Story of How General Motors Helped
Mobilize the Third Reich (Part 1)
Maury Klein, "How Did the Railroads
Survive and Prosper?"
Tom Palaima, The Big Question
that Needs to Be Asked at the Presidential Debates
Jonathan Schell, The
Triumph of Fantasy Politics,, response to Peter K. Clarke
Eric Zencey, Is
Industrial Civilization a Pyramid Scheme?
Carl Abbott , Finally, Too Many Cars
Graham Russell Gao Hodges, New York
City's Latest Taxi Scam
my comments on:
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."
-----------------------------------------------------
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]
http://www.rrstar.com/news/x931198448/Rescue-teams-on-scene-of-train-derailment
[unretrievable even with wayback machine]
-----------------------------------------------------
Thomas V. Bona, "Feds’ accident report on derailment likely
early in 2011", Rockford [Ill.] Register-Star, Jun 18, 2010
http://www.rrstar.com/news/yourtown/x1501907376/Feds-accident-report-on-derailment-likely-early-in-2011
[unretrievable even
with wayback machine]
-----------------------------------------------------
"Train derailment timeline," Rockford [Ill.] Register-Star,
Jun 18, 2010
http://www.rrstar.com/news/trainderailment/x1808630025/Train-derailment-timeline
[unretrievable even with
wayback machine]
----------------------------------------------------
"Train derailment anniversary: Lessons from ‘the big one’,"
Rockford [Ill.] Register-Star, Jun 19, 2010
http://www.rrstar.com/news/trainderailment
[unretrievable even with
wayback machine]
----------------------------------------------------
"One dead in fiery Rockford train derailment,"
Associated Press, June 20, 2009
formerly:
http://www.chicagobreakingnews.com/2009/06/rockford-train-derailment-causes-evacuations.html
now:
https://web.archive.org/web/20090625174528/http://www.chicagobreakingnews.com/2009/06/rockford-train-derailment-causes-evacuations.html
---------------------------------------------------
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Hunter_Harrison
-----------------------------------------------------
My comments on:
Andrew Ferguson: If our 16th president were
alive today, chances are he wouldn't be Barack Obama
03/31/2009 09:36 PM
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.
My comments on:
Ralph E. Luker, Modern History Notes, "Dreams of
Leaving," 10/07/2008 06:44 PM
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
formerly: http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2008/09/naked-airport-gordon-politics
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.
------------------------------
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.
My comments on:
Ronald Findlay and Kevin H. O'Rourke, Is Globalization Here to
Stay? (Maybe, Maybe Not), 02/16/2008 07:28 PM
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.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
formerly:
http://www.country-studies.com/peru/history-of-the-economy.html
now:
https://country-studies.com/peru/history-of-the-economy.html
-------------
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
----------------
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
------------
1911 Britannica article: Fisheries.
f
ormerly: http://encyclopedia.jrank.org/FAT_FLA/FISHERIES.html
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/35606/pg35606-images.html
----------------------------------------------------------
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
------------------------
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
----------------
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
----------------
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
------------------------------
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
----------------------------
http://jas.fass.org/cgi/reprint/1931/1/88.pdf
[site still missing on the wayback machine ]
---------------
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
------------------
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASF
--------------
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
-------------
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
--------------------
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
My
comments on:
Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Kentucky Fried Globalization
Originally
published 12-4-06
12/13/2006 05:55 AM
[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.
Edwin
Black, Hitler's Carmaker: The Inside Story of How General
Motors Helped Mobilize the Third Reich (Part 1)
04/27/2007
02:40 AM
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.
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.
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.
My comments on:
Maury Klein, "How Did the Railroads Survive and Prosper?"
07/04/2011 03:00 PM
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.
My comments on:
HNN post, re: Tom Palaima, The Big Question that
Needs to Be Asked at the Presidential Debates
09/28/2004 11:22 AM
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.
My comments on:
Jonathan Schell, The Triumph of Fantasy
Politics,, response to Peter K. Clarke
10/26/2004 12:39 PM
Peoria Will React Eventually
https://www.hnn.us/article/the-triumph-of-fantasy-politics
To:
Peter K. Clarke
I
didn't say that the price of oil will necessarily go to
$200/barrel. I said that the Europeans could afford to bid
it up that high. The point is that the Europeans have
comparative advantage over us as oil consumers. In
round numbers, Europe and Japan have a petroleum consumption
per capita which is about half of ours. What do you do if
they decide that in view of Bush's carrying-ons, they want a
five-year-supply, and they want to build it up in the
shortest possible period, and to hell with the yanks? This
is temporary of course, because once they get their
five-year-supply, they will scale back their imports to
normal levels. The European already has a car that gets 40
mpg, and presumably his government will lean on the local
automakers to make them provide hybrid power conversion
kits, for 60 mpg. That said, a barrel of oil, yielding
thirty gallons of gasoline or diesel, is about 900
miles of driving for them, or 225 round trips to a commuter
rail station two miles distant. On that basis, $200 is not
an unreasonable sum to pay. The average American
adult/licensed driver uses something like six hundred
gallons of gasoline a year, and his public transportation
fallback is a bus which is much slower. You know the poker
expression, "buying the pot"? Well, the Europeans can afford
to buy the pot, that's all. They aren't poor cousins any
more. To the extent that Europe acts in unison, it is
a richer and more powerful country than the United
States.
The
Amtrak North-East Corridor, the Long Island Railroad,
and the New York Subway System are generally conceded
to be the best American passenger railroads in their
respective categories. However, by European standards,
they are merely mediocre. As a French train salesman said
rather huffily to Amtrak officials, "you haven't _got_
any track good enough to do justice to our best
equipment." Europe has been spending money on its trains for
the past fifty years. Check out the St. Gotthard Base
Tunnel project. A total of sixty miles of tunnels, the main
tunnel thirty miles long, it will go under the Alps without
going up at all. Not only are European cars more efficient--
the Europeans are far less dependent on them.
Objects the size of a fuel refinery take a long time to
build, just as ships do. We might be talking about a
couple of years to build a tar sands or shale oil extraction
plant. This kind of equipment is not made on an assembly
line. It is all very well to talk about elasticities like an
economist, but actual production scheduling works out to
PERT/CPM charts, ie. who cannot do what because he needs for
someone else to do something else first? Which
specialized tools are sufficiently scarce that they have a
waiting list? For example: a specialized trip hammer capable
of making thousand-ton steel kettles twenty feet in
diameter, to cook large quantities of chemicals in.
What with CAD/CAM and all, the situation is considerably
better than it was in the 1970's. Two years might be a
tight enough window to be politically feasible. Jimmy
Carter' problem was that by 1980, he still had nothing in
the way of tangible results to show for his energy
initiatives. He needed more like ten years, and he didn't
have it.
I don't know if you are old enough to have usable memories
of the 1970's oil crisis. There was a period of several
years of confusion while the elasticities were sorting
themselves out. People who started the game better prepared
were able to achieve lasting advantage. The Japanese
automakers arrived in America with the oil crisis, and they
are still here. It turned out that the American automakers
literally did not know how to make small cars, and the
result was massive unemployment before they finally learned.
The Japanese are a long way ahead of the American automakers
in hybrid power, and it seems quite probable that they will
be able to mop up another sizable chunk of business.
The Europeans never allowed themselves to get as
automobile-drunk as we did. That means that they are not
going to experience the same kind of withdrawal symptoms.
They aren't going to have the DT's. What this means in
practical terms is that the inhabitants of Peoria will
simply not get enough gasoline to continue their
accustomed way of life. The Europeans will have
diverted it en route. The Peorians will be forced to rethink
things from the ground up.
What we have to work with in dealing with the energy
crisis in the United States, is a first-class
telecommunications infrastructure, built in the 1990's
with speculative capital, and now grossly
underutilized. However, that does not mean that all workers
can telecommute and everything goes on as usual. Whole
classes of jobs will simply disappear. Once a given
job becomes telecommutable, the question will arise: why not
telecommute it all the way to India? Or why not
automate it? Or why not reorganize in such a way as to
make it unnecessary? For example, the airlines are on the
verge of economic collapse. They were organized to
facilitate business travel, not to enable people to go and
see their grandchildren. That said, there is really no way
that the airlines can cope with the acceleration of business
to internet time. Important gaps may emerge between "have's
and have-not's," that is, between people who are enriched by
the internet, and people who are impoverished by
the internet. Many people who come out well in the long run
will still have to go through a year or so of chronic
economic fear, unemployed and haunting the state
unemployment office and taking a course at the
community college without really believing that it will lead
to a job.
In the March 1992 Issue of Life Magazine, there is an
article by Grey Villet, "Hard Times," about the town of Red
Bud, Illinois, a town of 2900 people which made its
living with a furnace-making factory which employed 800
people directly, and another 1200 via suppliers and
subcontractors. The new owner of the factory, a
Canadian multinational, closed them down in the fall of
1991. Some of the employees were still in Saudi Arabia as
reservists, and their bitterness was indescribable. A
decade later, the population is about 3400. The townspeople
fantasized about some new company coming in, white knight
fashion, to restart the factory, but that apparently did not
happen. No one wanted to make mass-production consumer goods
in a small town in Illinois. As near as I can make out
from the material turned up by a Google search, some
of the slack was eventually taken up by small
local machine shops growing bigger, and
selling specialized gear at longer distances.
Some of the inhabitants started commuting to St. Louis,
thirty miles away over secondary roads (a 45
minute drive, per Villet).
Red Bud is on the border between Monroe and Randolf
counties, and I have therefore combined the election
results for these two counties.
Year Democrats
Republicans Perot
1984 9611
16351
1988 12373 13671
1992 13423
9706
5905
1996 12217
10772
2974
Wham! People in places like Peoria and Red Bud do react when
the chickens finally come home to roost. These are
traditional midwestern folk. They surely didn't vote
that way because they admired Slick Willy's morals.
What the elephant knows, he never forgets.