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One of the ideas that seems to be missed from the study of history and economy, was the effect on the total destruction of the Japanese and German industrial ba
by pomian 3y ago
One of the ideas that seems to be missed from the study of history and economy, was the effect on the total destruction of the Japanese and German industrial base - during WWII.
Britain and USA, were left with their archaic industrial systems.
After WWII, the Japanese and the German steel industry had to be completely reborn.
(At the cost of primarily USA financing.)
Those two countries had no more relics of the past, and started over, necessarily, with the most modern technology and science.
North American industry was in a slow evolution from the 1900's, but Germany and Japan, had a hot start from the 1950-60's. No wonder everyone was impressed by their modern approach to construction, design, manufacturing, which more or less started to out perform USA and Britain in the 70's.
China, started it's industrial rebirth even later.
- mitthrowaway2 3y agoSolution for the future of American industry: Bomb US Steel? Maybe this would also be an effective way of clearing out NIMBYs blocking the routes for high-speed rail lines?
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> Solution for the future of American industry: Bomb US Steel? Plenty of places are bombed into oblivion. What makes the rebirth is the rebuilding. The marshalling of public resources. You can replicate that without the bombs with a public-spending initiative.
- Fatnino 3y agoHow do you spend away a bunch of NIMBYs? Their whole thing is that they refuse to cooperate with that. Bombs would solve that, but come with a host of other... issues.
- pstuart 3y agoEminent domain is the best we've got.
- mitthrowaway2 3y agoThe OP's contention was that Japan and Germany had an advantage due to their steel industry being bombed, which is apparently easier than upgrading legacy production facilities that haven't been blown to rubble.
- sokoloff 3y agoIt’s often easier to rebuild rubble using other people’s money than to modernize in-place using your own. Beyond just the “whose money is buying?” is that the latter costs you current production while the bombed-out scenario has no current production to forego.
- danans 3y ago> The marshalling of public resources. Indeed, something like a Marshall Plan! > You can replicate that without the bombs with a public-spending initiative. You can, but the challenge isn't in the implementation as much as gathering the political will to do that. Since the New Deal and WWII, that has rarely happened in the US, and only recently: The ACA, the 2021 Infrastructure Bill and the Inflation Reduction Act. All of those barely had enough support to pass and both are at risk if there is a significant shift in power.
- altairTF 3y agoEvery 100 years, the government send a warning and carpet bomb a city to the ground. This for sure would remove all the past vicious of the region affected. That would be something
- tandr 3y agoSounds like a good plot for a (short) sci-fi story.
- yetanotherloss 3y agoYou jest but my friend is a professor in Toyama, Japan, and makes the occasional dark joke about moving the people out for a few days and having the US raze it again from time to time. Sometimes getting rid of ossified organizations is a good thing, but there are probably better ways than high explosives.
- Aloha 3y agoArguably the Occupation of Japan was more important than the carpet bombing for changing Japanese culture. We brought in many new ideas - both in business and in government - most of which persist in some form today - and the Japanese in many cases have taken those ideas, refined them mightily, infused them with some Japanese culture - and re-exported them to us. The best example of this that I can think of, is Kaizen - the various scientific management techniques exported to Japan by W. Edwards Deming - which was re-exported to us as Kaizen.
- nerdponx 3y agoThis concept is related to the idea of "creative destruction": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction
- hef19898 3y ago>> (At the cost of primarily USA financing.) The Marshall Plan was one of the best foreign policy ideas ever so.
- kevbin 3y agoI’d like to see Chris Nolan follow-up “Oppenheimer” with “George (Marshall)” and “(William) Knudsen”
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ProjectArcturis 3y agoSimilar to many cities having catastrophic fires (New York, Chicago) which allowed them to rebuild their streets on a grid system. Vs Boston, which never had a great fire but which is known today for the phrase "You can't get there from here."
- turndown 3y agoChicago had a grid system before the great fire, maybe NY is a good example of this but I do not know. See this[0] 1869 map which shows Chicago was already quite regularized 0: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a8/1869_Blanchard%27s_map_of_Chicago_and_Environs.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a8/1869_Bla...
- ericjmorey 3y agoIt's not. The older parts of NYC are still not on a grid, there was no massive fire in NYC that needed to be rebuilt. They may have been thinking of London `¯\_(ツ)_/¯`
- caboteria 3y agoWe've had a couple of big fires: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Boston_Fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Boston_Fire Somehow they didn't result in exchanging grids for winding streets. The back bay, though, is newer than other parts of the city and it's a grid.
- technofiend 3y agoRe, Boston: The way I heard it was "Three rights make left, except in Boston."
- KMag 3y agoSee the movie "The Mouse That Roared". Having seen the results of Germany and Japan being bombed and rebuilt by the US, a small fictional country comes up with the brilliant development plan of intentionally starting and losing a war with the US. Spoiler alert: they end up having to deal with the tragedy of accidentally winning the war. As I recall, part of it was they just assumed their generals would lose, so the generals weren't in on the plan.
- l33t7332273 3y agoA small country winning the war against post WW2 USA seems like it would be a bit of a plot hole.
- loloquwowndueo 3y agoVietnam.
- l33t7332273 3y agoVietnam did not invade and occupy USA. What are we even talking about here?
- ben_w 3y agoIt's a comedy, one I feel I ought to watch at some point. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mouse_That_Roared_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mouse_That_Roared_(film)
- morkalork 3y agoPeter Sellers playing 3 different roles. Poor guy really did get type cast in the weirdest way.
- robertlagrant 3y ago"Comedies involving diamonds and/or nuclear weapons"
- sjfjsjdjwvwvc 3y agoThe German industrial base was not totally destroyed after WW2. Especially in western Germany most of it was still good and they had to rebuild little to get it going again. The myth of the Trümmerfrau rebuilding Germany into a Wirtschaftswunder from total destruction is exactly that, a myth. Edit: also the effect of Marshallplan is usually vastly overstated - due to the massive bureaucracy involved it had relatively little impact.
- WalterBright 3y agoMuch larger shares of the MP money went to Britain and France.
- robocat 3y agoCan we set up a system to occasionally bomb our industrial base to get these benefits? Your point is mostly irrelevant. US steel could have innovated or even copied - but it didn't. The idea that poor US steel couldn't compete because other startups had an advantage is assinine. That is a core message of the article itself.
- specialist 3y agoJust need to target the executive suites. Bonus points if the board is meeting at the time.
- hulitu 3y ago> North American industry was in a slow evolution from the 1900's, but Germany and Japan, had a hot start from the 1950-60's You forgot that US took every German and Japanese engineer as prisoner. As a friend said, US chemical industry worked 40 years after the WWII with German patents.
- justrealist 3y ago> You forgot that US took every German and Japanese engineer as prisoner. This is not even slightly true.
- Qwertious 3y ago>You forgot that US took every German and Japanese engineer as prisoner. Do you mean took them prisoner for a few days to sort out paperwork, or do you mean took them prisoner and kept them? The latter is provably nonsense as indicated by e.g. Heckler and Koch, a German engineering company (and later gun company) formed by three former Mauser engineers. Mauser, the gun company.
- boringuser2 3y agoI don't really like this claim because we are perfectly capable of blowing up our own factories, but people generally agree that it probably isn't a good idea.
- dhdudbd 3y agowhite man's burden never change hn
- ChuckMcM 3y agoIt is an interesting narrative but largely untrue. As the article points out, US Steel (and the US steel industry in general) was making enough profit, what they were not doing was re-investing those profits into upgrading their steel making. Instead, the "People in Charge" were giving themselves large bonuses and pay upgrades for being bosses of the "big steel." This was especially true through the 80's and 90's in a post "stagflation" atmosphere a lot of industry became more focused on executive pay than product production. The poster child was the auto industry "forgetting" how to make quality cars. They didn't forget of course, they just focused more on shoveling money into the C-suite and less on actually building a quality product. The massive erosion of the car market to Japanese automakers was a direct result of that shift of thinking.
- edmundsauto 3y agoI’m not sure that narrative on “forgetting how to build quality cars” is fair. Germany and Japan introduced a lot of new technologies and processes that would naturally be a little rocky from time to time. It is the nature of immature services. Once those matured, the new stuff quickly caught up. But it needed time. What makes you think it was the increase in executive or shareholder comp that caused the degradation in quality? Do we even know if there was a degradation between a 1960 ford and 1985, or is it because the Japanese and German automakers raised our standards? This is a situation where a lot of narratives fit the evidence.
- mildchalupa 3y agoHere's an example, before WWII brake lines were made out of Monel, a corrosion proof material aside from galvanic. Nickel and copper being expensive and needed elsewhere the lines were made then made from painted steel. After the war steel lines became the standard. The cost difference is small but it's indicative of a larger issue of disposability. One of the reasons Japanese vehicles started to dominate was that they lasted longer. This is due to better tolerances, more efficient engines, and more robust component design. The Toyota production method, lean and just-in-time were mostly methods for rationalizing better systems to eliminate waste within production and to minimize inventory. Such methods don't inherently make a better car though they leave more io the table to spend on coatings, quality parts etc.