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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: bentway who wrote (316439)	12/20/2006 1:02:12 AM
From: Elroy	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1574683

The middle class is the source of America's economic strength, from which all our other strengths spring. No, the middle class is not the source of strength in the US economy! There are plenty of sources of strength in the US economy, and one of the big ones is immigrant labor. Another is a strong work ethic (Europe takes 5-8 weeks holiday each year!). Another is a strong legal system and strong property rights. I don't know if you can even support the idea that the middle class is a source of economic strength. They are a source of societal stability (the peasants don't revolt) and education (they probably educate their children better than the poor educate their children), but I'm not sure how you see them as a source of economic strength.

To: bentway who wrote (316439)	3/10/2008 5:55:19 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 1574683

Henry Ford gave birth to the idea that created it, when he decided to DOUBLE the salaries he was paying to his employees so they could afford to buy the cars they were building. Increasing salaries in order to give your workers enough money to buy your product isn't going to be a net positive for your company. Even if 100% of the increase is spent on your product the effect would be the same as if you gave away the product instead of giving them the raise. The real reason for the increase in salaries was to keep workers. The assembly line work was more efficient than older methods but many workers didn't like it as much, and also Ford pushed his workers hard. If Ford didn't pay more for their services they would have left for other companies, and in fact they started to do that before he increased wages. ------ The Automotive Century and Mass Production Posted by David Foster on March 7th, 2008 (All posts by David Foster) On March 19, 1908, the Ford Model T was announced. Although the car would not begin shipping until September of that year, the response to the announcement was enthusiastic. One agent wrote, “we have rubbed our eyes several times to make sure we were not dreaming,” and another exclaimed, “It is without doubt the greatest creation in automobiles ever placed before a people, and it means that this circular alone will flood your factory with orders.” Although the Model T is generally associated with the assembly line, the car was in fact not built on assembly lines until 1913, five years after its introduction. (Although production was from the beginning designed with a strong focus on efficiency.) The assembly line was initially used for making components–first the magneto, the labor content of which was cut from 20 man-minutes to 5 man-minutes. Next was the transmission cover–18 minutes reduced to 9–and then the engine–594 minutes to cut 226. Finally, line-based chassis assembly was tried. In the initial attempt, six assemblers followed the slowly-moving chassis, picking up appropriate parts at each location. This reduced the chassis assembly labor from 12.5 man-hours to just under 6. Next, the line was changed so that the workers would stay in place, thus making each task more specialized. By April 1914, chassis assembly time was down to 1.5 man-hours per car. Workers mostly didn’t like the new system, and turnover soared. It was this distaste for assembly-line work, as well as the desire on the part of Ford and his partner James Couzens to be perceived as enlightened employers,that led to the famous five-dollar-a-day pay rate. For the first time, it was possible for a person making automobiles to have a realistic prospect of owning one. In early 1914, the wife of a Ford assembly worker wrote anonymously to Henry Ford: “The chain system you have is a slave driver! My God! Mr Ford. My husband has come home & thrown himself down and won’t eat his supper–so done out! Can’t it be remedied?…That $5 a day is a blessing–a bigger one than you know, but oh they earn it.” Jobs like this are now referred to nostalgically by politicians and social critics as “good jobs”–and indeed, they were and are in many ways. It’s interesting to note, though, that there is almost a century’s worth of social criticism which attacked assembly line work as dehumanizing and specifically as a creator of anomie. Here is the price history of the Model T–note that the price of the touring model fell from $850 initially to $290 in 1925. See also this analysis of the prices in terms of manufacturing learning-curve theory is here–note the linearity of the inflation-adjusted prices on the log-log scale. (p 39 & 40) More Model T information here. The information on assembly line productivity, and the quote from the Ford worker’s wife, are from the book From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932, by David Hounshell. chicagoboyz.net