I wonder how many jobs THAT innovation cost? Or might those job losses be offset by making the automobile more affordable thus ramping up production?
Well, THIS thread won’t get legs, but just happened to think about it. An assembly line seems so LOGICAL, it’s surprising it took so long to figure it out...
Discussion? Laughing out loud? Slow evening?
Adam Smith open his book wealth of nations talking about job specialization, telling it is faster, more productive and requires less workers. But such model was considered for low simple and low cost products that we know sells a lot, like pin/nail.
What I am writing now may not be true. It is just what I "feel" based on some spares information that I believe to have.
Before Ford it seems that some kind of products were considered only profitable by selling to upper class. Lat's face it, company that sell luxurious products like cars before Ford, only had to sell 1, 2 or 3 of their product in order to be profitable. Ford took the risk of the production line that takes quantity over quality and requires him to sell many more cars in order to be profitable. Despite producing more cars with assembling line requires less workers per car and less training and knowlodge from specialized workers, is the quantity and speed that makes it profitable so the factory itself has to work more to produce and sell as much as possible.
Making it short, nobody knew if a product like cars could be profitable (would sell enough)to compensate its lower price.
It is like the story about Germans photography cameras. There was many German high quality cameras manufactures before the war and some others tried to regain the market after the war. But a couple of decades after the war came the Japonese cameras companies, and their cheaper, simplified and faster production cameras for the mass kicked the over mechanic expensive and slower to produce German cameras out of the market. Germans factories were trying to revive the old good day of their pre-war industry, that was about prioritize quality and design over quantity and price.
Germany is still like this, but they specialized in high tech niche products and/or innovation. But Germany had the advantage long tame ago to have a high valuable money, that in one hand made it impossible to make cheaper cost products to compete with Americans and Japanese, but they where clever to use their high valuable money to buy machinery and technologies from these countries and create new technologies and innovation. Now Germany is the main supplier of niche machinery and technology to industries all over the world.
Now, the Ford case happened in America seems to be because in America there was much more people willing to take risk, experiment, etc. And the reason for that seems to be the easier loan credit, money had more value back then and costs in america was and still is cheaper overall. So people can fail many times and still be able to start again. While in Europe factories had a more conservative family business tradition, harder to get loans and the higher costs made it much harder to start again if failed.
Still today Germany is very phobic about taking risk and do things out of what they believe they are suppose to expect. Reason why Germany is very slow about change and decision making. A couple of Years ago trains station and supermarkets didn't accepted credit card and in most towns it is still not possible to shop with electronic cards. Take loan in Germany is very hard and even start a business is crazy bureaucratic. You can't start a business just to try, if you get in you have to be sure you know what you are doing or have a very good backup plan.
