Ford paid five dollars a day

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pages: 356 words: 116,083

For Profit: A History of Corporations by William Magnuson

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Ford awaited them there, standing silently by the window “with an air of restless detachment from the business in hand.” The lieutenant handed the reporters a two-page typed statement and began to read from it. The announcement was nothing less than staggering. From that time on, the lieutenant read, all employees at the Ford Motor Company would receive five dollars a day for their work, more than double what they had been making. In addition, Ford was reducing the length of the workday, from the standard nine or ten hours typical in the automotive industry to eight hours. Finally, Ford was hiring: his company planned to bring on several thousand new workers in the coming days.

As Ford explained to the reporters after the lieutenant had finished reading, “We believe in making twenty thousand men prosperous and contented rather than follow the plan of making a few slave drivers in our establishment multi-millionaires.”1 When the reporters pressed Ford to clarify precisely who would be entitled to this unprecedented pay raise, Ford calmly explained, “The commonest laborer who sweeps the floor shall receive his five dollars a day.” “But Mr. Ford,” one of the reporters replied in astonishment, “tomorrow morning there will be five thousand men out there in the street with brooms!” Ford, unshaken, answered him, “No, nothing like that.”2 In fact, it was not five thousand men who showed up the next day.

Another part of the equation was the morale of Ford workers: attrition rates were shockingly high, and Ford sought a way to encourage loyalty to his company. The competitive landscape of the automobile industry also played a role: while there were many automobile companies in America, the Model T was vastly more popular than any other car on the market, and Ford believed that he could sell as many cars as he could produce. But perhaps the most important reason for the five-dollar day was Henry Ford’s vision of the role of the corporation in society. “The trouble with a great many of us in the business world,” Ford wrote, “is that we are thinking hardest of all about the dollars we want to make. Now that is the wrong idea right at the start.


pages: 538 words: 145,243

Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World by Joshua B. Freeman

anti-communist, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Corn Laws, corporate raider, cotton gin, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, joint-stock company, knowledge worker, mass immigration, means of production, mittelstand, Naomi Klein, new economy, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Just as at the Derby silk mill and the Waltham cotton mill, a new system of production came together in a remarkably short period of time. In less than two years after the first experiments with the assembly line, Ford had installed the system for all phases of Model T production. The factory had become one huge, integrated machine.16 Ford Labor Problems and the Five Dollar Day Some of the productivity gain of the assembly line came from the greater efficiency of material handling. Some came from the increased division of labor. But much of it came from the sheer intensification of work, the elimination of the ability of workers to wander around looking for a part or tool, to slow down while a foreman wasn’t watching, or to store up finished parts to allow resting later on.

In Detroit, both the radical Industrial Workers of the World and the new Carriage, Wagon, and Automobile Workers’ Union, affiliated with the more moderate American Federation of Labor, launched organizing drives in the auto industry, leading a few short strikes. Their gains were modest, but their specter haunted employers.23 Ford responded to its labor problems with a program of higher pay and shorter hours, “The Five Dollar Day.” Already, the company had begun instituting policies to retain employees and increase their productivity. In 1913, it introduced a multitiered wage plan that boosted pay as workers’ skills grew and, with longevity, a spur to self-improvement and steady employment.

Perhaps surprisingly, given Ford’s later reputation as a union-hating, conservative autocrat, some prominent leftists at first praised the Ford system. In early 1916, after visiting the Highland Park plant, Kate Richards O’Hare, a well-known socialist leader, published two articles in The National Rip-Saw, a mass circulation socialist monthly, praising Henry Ford. O’Hare saw the Five Dollar Day, the Sociological Department, and the Ford English School as advancing the lot of workers (along with Ford’s decision to take the power to fire away from foremen). Using a jarringly racist simile, she wrote that as a result of Ford’s policies “men freeze to a job in the Ford plant like a negro to a fat possum.”


pages: 251 words: 76,128

Borrow: The American Way of Debt by Louis Hyman

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, big-box store, business cycle, cashless society, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, deindustrialization, deskilling, diversified portfolio, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, low interest rates, market bubble, McMansion, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, new economy, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price stability, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, statistical model, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, transaction costs, vertical integration, women in the workforce

I could not possibly do the same thing day in and day out, but other minds, perhaps I might say to the majority of minds, repetitive operations hold no terrors. In fact, to some types of mind thought is absolutely appalling.”7 Yet even for the majority, the work was intolerable. In the early 1910s, Ford had to rehire his entire workforce three or four times a year because everyone quit. The “five-dollar-day,” started in 1914, when Ford paid his workers $5 a day—twice the market wage—virtually eliminated absenteeism and kept the assembly line running. The higher wage also enabled a new generation of American workers to privilege their consumer identity over their producer identity.8 Wages mattered more than workplace control as long as the work was steady and well paid.

Many of those who lost their jobs in the crisis remain unemployed but go uncounted since they have run out of benefits and haven’t looked for work in the last two weeks (which is how the government measures unemployment). Even those who have found work have often had to accept lower wages. The media celebration of McDonald’s National Hiring Day in early 2011 speaks to how far we have drifted from Ford’s five-dollar day. Even for those with jobs, income interruptions remain as dangerous as ever, as unemployment times lengthen. Since health care insurance is tied to employment, illness and job loss can continue to be a double whammy. Compared to Europe, the limited welfare state has pushed Americans to borrow to bridge unemployment and pay for health care.


pages: 242 words: 245

The New Ruthless Economy: Work & Power in the Digital Age by Simon Head

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, business cycle, business process, call centre, conceptual framework, deskilling, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, informal economy, information retrieval, Larry Ellison, medical malpractice, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, scientific management, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, supply-chain management, telemarketer, Thomas Davenport, Toyota Production System, union organizing, work culture

Henry Ford, in collaboration with Samuel Crowther, My Life and Work (New York, 1922), quoted in Alfred D. Chandler, Giant Enterprise, Ford, General Motors and the Automobile Industry, Sources and Readings (New York, 1964), p. 39. 30. Meyer, Five Dollar Day, p. 32-35. 31. Ford, My Life and Work, quoted in Meyer, Five Dollar Day, p. 21. 195 NOTES TO CHAPTER 3 32. See, for example, Arnold, Ford Methods and the Ford Shops, pp. 117-27. 33. Ibid., p. 144. 34. Charles Reitell, "Machinery and Its Effect Upon the Workers in the Automobile Industry," Annuls of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 116 (November 1924), quoted in Chandler, Giant Enterprise, p. 183. 35.

David Montgomery, Fall of the House of Labor (New York, 1987), p. 247. 21. Chandler, The Visible Hand,?. 278. 22. Hounshell, From the American System, pp. 220, 224. 23. Stephen Meyer, The Five Dollar Day: Labor, Management, and Social Control in the Ford Motor Company, 1908-1921 (Albany, N.Y., 1981), p. 25. 24. Hounshell, From the American System, p. 251. 25. Meyer, Five Dollar Day, pp. 11,20-21. 26. Horace Arnold, Ford Methods and the Ford Shops (New York, 1915), p. 246. Available at the New York Public Library, on microfilm, call number, *XMQ-428. 27. Ibid., p. 174. 28. Ibid., p. 349. 29. Henry Ford, in collaboration with Samuel Crowther, My Life and Work (New York, 1922), quoted in Alfred D.


pages: 400 words: 129,841

Capitalism: the unknown ideal by Ayn Rand

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business cycle, data science, East Village, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, Isaac Newton, laissez-faire capitalism, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, profit motive, the market place, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, War on Poverty, yellow journalism

It was the economic self-interest of employers that led them to raise wages and shorten working hours—not the pressure of labor unions. The eight-hour day was established in most American industries long before unions acquired any significant size or economic power. At a time when his competitors were paying their workers between two and three dollars a day, Henry Ford offered five dollars a day, thereby attracting the most efficient labor force in the country, and thus raising his own production and profits. In the 1920’s, when the labor movement in France and Germany was far more dominant than in the United States, the standard of living of the American worker was greatly superior.


pages: 382 words: 114,537

On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane by Emily Guendelsberger

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, company town, David Attenborough, death from overwork, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, hive mind, housing crisis, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Jon Ronson, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Lean Startup, market design, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McJob, Minecraft, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, precariat, Richard Thaler, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Travis Kalanick, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, wage slave, working poor

When we left Ford, he was trying to solve the horrendous turnover problem caused by his debut of the assembly line in 1913—workers were so miserable that he couldn’t keep the Crystal Palace staffed, and it was crippling production. So in 1914, Ford announced the famous five-dollar day—a raise in wages to nearly twice what you could make elsewhere in Detroit. There’s a lot of mythology about why he did this; anything attributing it to Ford being a nice guy or something is pure bullshit. Know this: Ford had to offer five dollars a day to make it worthwhile to put up with the miserable conditions of the Crystal Palace.* But the markets worked—Ford’s turnover problem vanished. Other factories around Detroit—and soon the rest of the country—had to raise wages to compete for the best workers.


pages: 918 words: 257,605

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, algorithmic bias, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bartolomé de las Casas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, book scanning, Broken windows theory, California gold rush, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, connected car, context collapse, corporate governance, corporate personhood, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, dogs of the Dow, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, fake news, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, future of work, game design, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Ian Bogost, impulse control, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, linked data, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, precision agriculture, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, smart cities, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social web, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, union organizing, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , Yochai Benkler, you are the product

Henry Ford was clear on this point: “Mass production begins in the perception of a public need.”5 At a time when the Detroit automobile manufacturers were preoccupied with luxury vehicles, Ford stood alone in his recognition of a nation of newly modernizing individuals—farmers, wage earners, and shopkeepers—who had little and wanted much, but at a price they could afford. Their “demand” issued from the same conditions of existence that summoned Ford and his men as they discovered the transformational power of a new logic of standardized, high-volume, low-unit-cost production. Ford’s famous “five-dollar day” was emblematic of a systemic logic of reciprocity. In paying assembly-line workers higher wages than anyone had yet imagined, he recognized that the whole enterprise of mass production rested upon a thriving population of mass consumers. Although the market form and its bosses had many failings and produced many violent facts, its populations of newly modernizing individuals were valued as the necessary sources of customers and employees.

This cycle will be broken only when we acknowledge as citizens, as societies, and indeed as a civilization that surveillance capitalists know too much to qualify for freedom. II. After Reciprocity In another decisive break with capitalism’s past, surveillance capitalists abandon the organic reciprocities with people that have long been a mark of capitalism’s endurance and adaptability. Symbolized in the twentieth century by Ford’s five-dollar day, these reciprocities hearken back to Adam Smith’s original insights into the productive social relations of capitalism, in which firms rely on people as employees and customers. Smith argued that price increases had to be balanced with wage increases “so that the labourer may still be able to purchase that quantity of those necessary articles which the state of the demand for labour… requires that he should have.”10 The shareholder-value movement and globalization went a long way toward destroying this centuries-old social contract between capitalism and its communities, substituting formal indifference for reciprocity.

Wiebe, The Search for Order: 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967); John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” in Essays in Persuasion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1930). By 2014, a Standard and Poor’s report concluded that income inequality impedes economic growth and destabilizes the social fabric, a fact that Henry Ford had long ago acknowledged with his five-dollar day. See “How Increasing Income Inequality Is Dampening US Economic Growth, and Possible Ways to Change the Tide,” S&P Capital IQ, Global Credit Portal Report, August 5, 2014, https://www.globalcreditportal.com/ratingsdirect/renderArticle.do?articleId=1351366&SctArtId=255732&from=CM&nsl_code=LIME&sourceObjectId=8741033&sourceRevId=1&fee_ind=N&exp_date=20240804-19:41:13. 44.


pages: 353 words: 98,267

The Price of Everything: And the Hidden Logic of Value by Eduardo Porter

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, British Empire, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Credit Default Swap, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, flying shuttle, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, guest worker program, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, longitudinal study, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, new economy, New Urbanism, peer-to-peer, pension reform, Peter Singer: altruism, pets.com, placebo effect, precautionary principle, price discrimination, price stability, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, ultimatum game, unpaid internship, urban planning, Veblen good, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

Other pioneers tried to deploy pay as an incentive. Facing low worker morale and high turnover on the production line, in January 1914 Henry Ford raised wages to five dollars a day, doubling at a stroke most workers’ pay. It worked, apparently. Job seekers formed a line around Ford’s shop. The journalist O. J. Abell wrote at the time that after the pay hike Ford was churning out 15 percent more cars a day with 14 percent fewer workers. Henry Ford later observed: “The payment of five dollars a day for an eight-hour day was one of the finest cost-cutting moves we ever made.” Gradually, the rest of the car industry followed.


pages: 603 words: 182,781

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

“Winter Is Here, but Spring Is Coming Too” “The U.S. automotive industry has been pushed to the verge of collapse,” the chairman of American Axle decreed two years ago. Michigan has shed two-thirds of its autoworkers in barely a decade. If Detroit is to have a future, then its residents must give up their malignant dreams of its past, the dream of Henry Ford’s five-dollar-a-day wages and River Rouge, where one hundred thousand men once forged raw coal, sand, and iron into Model Ts. His dream was to build a city on the back of such immense and monotonous efficiency, spurning the “fertile and creative inefficiency” Jane Jacobs recognized as the sign of vitality.


pages: 341 words: 89,986

Bricks & Mortals: Ten Great Buildings and the People They Made by Tom Wilkinson

Berlin Wall, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, double helix, experimental subject, false memory syndrome, financial independence, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gentrification, Google Glasses, housing crisis, Kitchen Debate, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, megacity, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, nudge theory, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, scientific management, starchitect, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration

The home had become part of the factory and was – just as much as a glass or tyre plant, a steel press or an iron foundry – a site of production, reconceived as a total process, and thus also subject to the improvements of scientific management. But Ford’s imperial troops eventually retreated from the battlefield of the home. In 1921 he gave up on social engineering and shut down the Sociological Department. Continuing demands for unionisation had embittered Ford. He would not countenance bargaining with his employees and felt that his five-dollar munificence was going unappreciated. That year he instituted a speed-up that squeezed the same output from 40 per cent fewer workers, which allowed him to sack 20,000 men, including 75 per cent of his middle managers. As a result, his profits for 1921–2 jumped to $200 million.


pages: 387 words: 110,820

Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppel Shell

accelerated depreciation, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bread and circuses, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, deskilling, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, fear of failure, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global village, Howard Zinn, income inequality, interchangeable parts, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, market design, means of production, mental accounting, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Pearl River Delta, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price discrimination, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, side project, Steve Jobs, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, Victor Gruen, washing machines reduced drudgery, working poor, yield management, zero-sum game

Workers were disqualified if it was determined that the lavish sum of $5 a day would “make of them a menace to society” and “no man was to receive the money who could not use it advisedly.” 21 automakers were forced to follow suit: See, for example, Stephen Meyer III, The Five-Dollar Day: Labor Management and Social Control in the Ford Motor Company, 1908-1921 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981). For an excellent online synopsis of this period in Ford history, see “The Assembly Line and the Five Dollar Day” at http://www.michigan.gov/hal/0,1607,7-160-17451__18670__18793-53441—,00.html. 21 five-dollar day; and low prices: Ibid., 263. 21 to $290 in the early 1920s: Steven Babson, Working Detroit, 30. 21 that placed goods and spending at the center of social life: Charles McGovern, Sold American: Consumption and Citizenship, 1890-1945 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2006). 22 “promise of greater freedom, democracy and quality”: Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic (New York: Knopf, 2003).


pages: 265 words: 74,941

The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work by Richard Florida

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, big-box store, bike sharing, blue-collar work, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, creative destruction, deskilling, edge city, Edward Glaeser, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford paid five dollars a day, high net worth, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invention of the telephone, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, McMansion, megaproject, Menlo Park, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, pattern recognition, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, total factor productivity, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, young professional, Zipcar

Suburbanization was the spatial fix for the industrial age—the geographic expression of that economic model. Henry Ford’s automobiles had been rolling off assembly lines since 1913. After making auto production cheaper and more efficient, Henry Ford realized that a bigger market for his assembly-line cars was needed, so he boosted workers’ wages and introduced the “five-dollar day.” But true Fordism, the combination of mass production and mass consumption, didn’t emerge as a full-blown economic and social model until mass suburbanization—the spatial fix of post–World War II America. Our own collapse, in the early years of the twenty-first century, is the crisis of the latest economic revolution—the rise of an idea-driven knowledge economy that runs more on brains than brawn.

By the time Keynes published his classic General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in 1936, it was clear that government had to spend money to counter economic decline, but it was also clear where that money should be spent: on large-scale infrastructure construction projects such as highways, public works, and even housing. Well before Keynes argued for government spending to stimulate the economy, Henry Ford made the case for a five-dollar working day, so autoworkers could purchase the cars they built. The retail magnate Lincoln Filene—yes, he of Filene’s Basement—said the key challenge facing the economy was to boost consumer demand for all sorts of products. Some even interpreted Keynes as implying that the economy would be better off even if all workers did was dig ditches and fill them up again.


pages: 246 words: 74,404

Do Nothing: How to Break Away From Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving by Celeste Headlee

8-hour work day, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Atul Gawande, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, correlation does not imply causation, deliberate practice, Downton Abbey, Dunbar number, Elon Musk, estate planning, financial independence, Ford paid five dollars a day, gamification, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Henri Poincaré, hive mind, income inequality, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Lyft, new economy, Parkinson's law, performance metric, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, Torches of Freedom, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, women in the workforce, work culture

That means people are willing to remain in the office, knowing it won’t affect their ability to get things done at home. Perhaps the most disastrous unintended consequence of a positive intention dates all the way back to Henry Ford in the early twentieth century. On May 1, 1926, Ford Motor Company became one of the first to institute a forty-hour week for its employees. Ford had already created the five-dollar workday in 1914, a decision that had profound impacts on labor everywhere and helped create a new class of consumers: employees with enough disposable income to afford the very vehicles they helped build. Ford is often credited with helping to create the middle class in the United States.


pages: 622 words: 169,014

Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction by Alec Nevala-Lee

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, basic income, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Doomsday Clock, Elon Musk, experimental subject, Ford paid five dollars a day, heat death of the universe, lone genius, Neil Armstrong, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Strategic Defense Initiative, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair

It inspired endless imitations, and it even influenced Campbell’s decision to major in physics—atomic energy, he felt, was the big scoop of his lifetime, a conviction shared by few of his professors. Yet it didn’t occur to him to write until he was a freshman, and when it did, it was for a reason that the captain of the Skylark might have approved. He wanted a new car. A Model A Ford cost five hundred dollars, and his father informed him, “I owe you a good education; luxuries you get for yourself.” Amazing paid half a cent per word, so Campbell cranked out “Invaders from the Infinite,” writing it as fast as he could because he needed the money. He showed the result to his father, who liked it enough to send it to editor T.


pages: 290 words: 85,847

A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next by Tom Standage

accelerated depreciation, active transport: walking or cycling, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-city movement, bike sharing, car-free, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Chris Urmson, City Beautiful movement, Clapham omnibus, congestion charging, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, Didi Chuxing, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, Ida Tarbell, Induced demand, interchangeable parts, invention of the wheel, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Joan Didion, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, minimum wage unemployment, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, peak oil, prompt engineering, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, safety bicycle, self-driving car, social distancing, Steve Jobs, streetcar suburb, tech bro, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbiased observer, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, W. E. B. Du Bois, walkable city, white flight, wikimedia commons, Yom Kippur War, Zipcar

Strange as it may seem, paying higher wages was yet another way of cutting costs and improving efficiency. In 1913, the year before the $5 wage was introduced, 71 percent of Ford’s new hires had left within five days. Paying higher wages reduced employee turnover, and hence the amount of time needed for training. Ford claimed that “the payment of five dollars a day for an eight-hour day was one of the finest cost-cutting moves we ever made.” Average earnings in the United States in 1914 were $335, whereas a Ford employee working five-day weeks for fifty weeks would make $1,250. This also meant that many Ford workers could actually afford the machines they were building, particularly as the price fell.


pages: 350 words: 110,764

The Problem With Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries by Kathi Weeks

antiwork, basic income, call centre, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, deskilling, feminist movement, financial independence, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, glass ceiling, Kim Stanley Robinson, late capitalism, low-wage service sector, means of production, Meghnad Desai, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, occupational segregation, pink-collar, post-Fordism, post-work, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, Shoshana Zuboff, social intelligence, two tier labour market, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, women in the workforce, work culture , zero-sum game

Edited and with an introduction by David McLellan. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Massumi, Brian. 1995. “The Autonomy of Affect.” Cultural Critique 31:83–109. Mathers, Andy. 1999. “Euromarch—the Struggle for a Social Europe.” Capital & Class 68:15–19. May, Martha. 1987. “The Historical Problem of the Family Wage: The Ford Motor Company and the Five Dollar Day.” In Families and Work, edited by Naomi Gerstel and Harriet Engel Gross, 111–31. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. McArdle, Louise, et al. 1995. “Total Quality Management and Participation: Employee Empowerment or the Enhancement of Exploitation?” In Making Quality Critical: New Perspectives on Organizational Change, edited by Adrian Wilkinson and Hugh Willmott, 156–72.


pages: 340 words: 92,904

Street Smart: The Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars by Samuel I. Schwartz

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, autonomous vehicles, bike sharing, car-free, City Beautiful movement, collaborative consumption, congestion charging, congestion pricing, crowdsourcing, desegregation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Enrique Peñalosa, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, Induced demand, intermodal, invention of the wheel, lake wobegon effect, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, longitudinal study, Lyft, Masdar, megacity, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nate Silver, oil shock, parking minimums, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, scientific management, self-driving car, skinny streets, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, TED Talk, the built environment, the map is not the territory, transportation-network company, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, Wall-E, white flight, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

In 1911, though, Ford moved manufacturing to a new state-of-the-art plant in Highland Park and turned out seventy thousand T’s. It was only the beginning. In 1912, Highland Park made 170,000 cars; in 1913, more than 200,000. In 1914, not only did the factory’s laborers churn out 308,000 cars, but they did so at a salary that Ford had doubled, to the famous “five-dollar day.” By 1915, when Highland Park produced more than half a million Model T’s, the price had dropped under $300 each, which meant that Ford assembly-line workers needed to work only nine weeks or so to earn enough money to buy a brand-new car. And they did. As did millions of others.


pages: 324 words: 93,606

No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy by Linsey McGoey

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, American Legislative Exchange Council, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, cashless society, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, crony capitalism, effective altruism, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, financial innovation, Food sovereignty, Ford paid five dollars a day, germ theory of disease, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Ida Tarbell, impact investing, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Elkington, Joseph Schumpeter, Leo Hollis, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, microcredit, Mitch Kapor, Mont Pelerin Society, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, price mechanism, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school choice, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, tacit knowledge, technological solutionism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators

The Ford Foundation wasn’t set up until 1936, after Ford spent decades building his wealth through business practices and personal politics even more controversial than those of Carnegie and Rockefeller. Both an early supporter of high wages and a fierce opponent of labour unions, Ford was something of a paradox. He stunned fellow industrialists in 1914 by introducing a wage in his industries of five dollars a day, for eight hours’ work, at a time when the average wage was two and a half dollars for ten hours’ work. In an interview for World’s Work, Ford explained that a shorter week and higher wages led to more productive employees. The value of permitting more leisure time was, Ford asserted, a ‘cold business fact’.


pages: 563 words: 136,190

The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America by Gabriel Winant

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, antiwork, blue-collar work, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, deindustrialization, desegregation, deskilling, emotional labour, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, future of work, ghettoisation, independent contractor, invisible hand, Kitchen Debate, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pink-collar, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, price stability, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, the built environment, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, white flight, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace Chang, and Linda Rennie Forcey (New York: Routledge, 1994), 45–66; Premilla Nadasen, “Expanding the Boundaries of the Women’s Movement: Black Feminism and the Struggle for Welfare Rights,” Feminist Studies 28, no. 2 (Summer 2002), 270–301. 31. See Martha May, “The Historical Problem of the Family Wage: The Ford Motor Company and the Five-Dollar Day,” Feminist Studies 8, no. 2 (Summer 1982), 399–424; Elizabeth Faue, Community of Suffering and Struggle: Women, Men, and the Labor Movement in Minneapolis, 1915–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Tithi Bhattacharya, ed., Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression (London: Pluto, 2017).


pages: 502 words: 125,785

The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War by A. J. Baime

banking crisis, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, gentleman farmer, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, housing crisis, interchangeable parts, Louis Blériot, mass immigration, means of production, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker

. [>] “Fancy a jungle of wheels”: Julian Street and Wallace Morgan, Abroad at Home (New York: The Century Company, 1914), p. 93. [>] “The Ford Motor Company”: Brinkley, Wheels for the World, p. 162. [>] “He’s crazy, isn’t he?”: Collier and Horowitz, The Fords, p. 49. [>] “Biblical principles”: Ibid. [>] “see to it that he’s”: Robert Lacey, Ford: The Men and the Machine (Boston: Little, Brown, 1986), pp. 222–23. [>] “Five dollars a day was”: Brinkley, Wheels for the World, p. 171. [>] “We are going to make it”: Beasley, Knudsen, p. 71. [>] “the Zeus of American mythology”: Reynold M. Wik, Henry Ford and Grass Roots America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), p. 6. [>] ranked Henry Ford third: Charles Higham, Trading with the Enemy (Lincoln, NE: Authors Guild Backinprint.com, 2007), p. 154. [>] “The machine is the new messiah”: Henry Ford, “Machinery, the New Messiah,” The Forum 79, March 1928, pp. 363–64. [>] “Machinery is accomplishing”: Henry Ford and Ray Leone Faurote, My Philosophy of Industry (New York: Coward-McCann, 1929), pp. 18–19. 3.


pages: 323 words: 90,868

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century by Ryan Avent

3D printing, Airbnb, American energy revolution, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, creative destruction, currency risk, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, heat death of the universe, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, knowledge economy, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, performance metric, pets.com, post-work, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, very high income, warehouse robotics, working-age population

Dabla-Norris, Era, Kochhar, Kalpana, Suphaphiphat, Nujin, Ricka, Frantisek, and Tsounta, Evridiki, ‘Causes and Consequences of Income Inequality: A Global Perspective’, IMF Staff Discussion Note, 1 June 2015.   4. Raff, Daniel, and Summers, Lawrence, ‘Did Henry Ford Pay Efficiency Wages?’, Journal of Labor Economics, Vol. 5, No. 4, Pt 2, October 1987.   5. Meyer, III, Stephen, The Five Dollar Day: Labor Management and Social Control in the Ford Motor Company, 1908-1921 (New York, NY: SUNY Press, 1981), quoted in ibid.   6. Hall, Jonathan, and Krueger, Alan, ‘An Analysis of the Labor Market for Uber’s Driver-Partners in the United States’, Working Paper, Princeton University, Industrial Relations Section, January 2015.   7. 


pages: 267 words: 72,552

Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Thomas Ramge

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Apollo 11, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, banking crisis, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, gig economy, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land reform, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, low cost airline, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, Parag Khanna, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, random walk, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, statistical model, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, universal basic income, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator


pages: 1,073 words: 302,361

Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World by William D. Cohan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, deal flow, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford paid five dollars a day, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, hiring and firing, hive mind, Hyman Minsky, interest rate swap, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, margin call, market bubble, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, short squeeze, South Sea Bubble, tail risk, time value of money, too big to fail, traveling salesman, two and twenty, value at risk, work culture , yield curve, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

“I always thought that ours was the best-furnished porch in Montclair,” Whitehead quipped. During the Depression, the Whiteheads survived on macaroni and cheese and codfish cakes, recycled clothing, Amos ’n’ Andy, Jack Armstrong, The All-American Boy, and Roosevelt’s fireside chats. The family was able to spring for a new 1934 Model A Ford—cost: five hundred dollars. Like so many of his generation, living through the Depression seared in Whitehead an aversion to risk and borrowing money. “I don’t even like credit cards!” he proclaimed. But he did not think of his family as poor “probably because we were no worse off than anyone else I knew.” Whitehead seemed to have a fairly normal childhood, collecting acorns, Indian-head pennies, and stamps.


The Origins of the Urban Crisis by Sugrue, Thomas J.

affirmative action, business climate, classic study, collective bargaining, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Ford paid five dollars a day, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, job automation, jobless men, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, oil shock, pink-collar, postindustrial economy, Quicken Loans, rent control, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, technological determinism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white flight, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

On Catholic women, gender, and family ideology in the postwar era, see Kathryn Johnson, “Creating an American Catholic Identity: The Politics of Family Life in Postwar American Culture” (paper presented to the American Studies Association Annual Meeting, Pittsburgh, November 1995), and Johnson’s important dissertation in progress at the University of Pennsylvania. On the family wage, see Martha May, “The Historical Problem of the Family Wage: The Ford Motor Company and the Five Dollar Day,” Feminist Studies 8 (1982): 399–424; Elizabeth Faue, Community of Suffering and Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). On female labor force participation and changing ideas about women and work, see the important article by Susan M. Hartmann, “Women’s Work and the Domestic Ideal in the Early Cold War Years,” in Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, ed.


pages: 416 words: 129,308

The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone by Brian Merchant

Airbnb, animal electricity, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Black Lives Matter, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cotton gin, deep learning, DeepMind, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, gigafactory, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Higgs boson, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, information security, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, John Gruber, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Large Hadron Collider, Lyft, M-Pesa, MITM: man-in-the-middle, more computing power than Apollo, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, pattern recognition, peak oil, pirate software, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, TSMC, Turing test, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, zero day

It is reportedly building a fleet of so-called Foxbots, iPhone-building robots that might eventually replace human laborers altogether. All of this serves to keep its employees’ wages—which are higher than other factory workers’, it must be noted—low. It’s a pretty astonishing sign of how far the assembly line has evolved. Henry Ford famously began paying his workers five dollars a day in 1914, a high wage for the era, saying he thought they ought to be able to afford the Model Ts they were making. (That wasn’t the whole story, of course—before he increased wages, he had a major attrition problem. The annual turnover rate was 370 percent because people hated the boring, repetitive work.)


pages: 277 words: 91,698

pages: 593 words: 183,240

An Economic History of the Twentieth Century by J. Bradford Delong

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, ASML, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, ending welfare as we know it, endogenous growth, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial repression, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, German hyperinflation, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, industrial research laboratory, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, It's morning again in America, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, land reform, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, occupational segregation, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Pearl River Delta, Phillips curve, plutocrats, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, Stanislav Petrov, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, Suez canal 1869, surveillance capitalism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, TSMC, union organizing, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, Yom Kippur War


pages: 540 words: 168,921

The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism by Joyce Appleby

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Doha Development Round, double entry bookkeeping, epigenetics, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Firefox, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, General Magic , Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, informal economy, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, land bank, land reform, Livingstone, I presume, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, PalmPilot, Parag Khanna, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

His mass producers at one factory spoke fifty different languages, but it didn’t matter, because they needed to know how to do only one task.43 Ford’s success can be measured by the fact that his famous assembly line, when perfected, could turn out a car in ninety-eight minutes! The Model T made its appearance in 1908; it was elegant in design and engineering and available in any color, Ford announced, “as long as it was black.” More important, most middle-class Americans could afford one, including Ford’s workers, whom he started paying five dollars a day in 1914. His goal was for his men to earn wages high enough for them to buy what they produced. And buy they did. The scientific management of labor had already attracted the attention of Frederick Winslow Taylor, who carefully observed men working in the steel industry in the 1880s and 1890s.


pages: 619 words: 177,548

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, GPT-3, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neolithic agricultural revolution, Norbert Wiener, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, spice trade, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, subscription business, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor, working-age population

Today, the owners of baseball teams still do well, but they are forced to share much more of their rents with the athletes. Employers may also share rents to cultivate goodwill and motivate employees to work harder, or because prevailing social norms convince them to do so. On January 5, 1914, Henry Ford famously introduced a minimum pay of five dollars per day to reduce absenteeism, to improve retention of workers, and presumably to reduce the risk of strikes. Many employers have since tried something similar, particularly when it is hard to hire and retain people or when motivating employees turns out to be critical for corporate success.


pages: 394 words: 118,929

Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software by Scott Rosenberg

A Pattern Language, AOL-Time Warner, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, c2.com, call centre, collaborative editing, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, continuous integration, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dynabook, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, functional programming, General Magic , George Santayana, Grace Hopper, Guido van Rossum, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, index card, intentional community, Internet Archive, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, L Peter Deutsch, Larry Wall, life extension, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Menlo Park, Merlin Mann, Mitch Kapor, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Nicholas Carr, no silver bullet, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, scientific management, semantic web, side project, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, slashdot, software studies, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Therac-25, thinkpad, Turing test, VA Linux, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

There’s McDonald’s “Innovate”—$170 million down the drain in a failed effort to turn the entire fast-food chain into a “real-time network” that would give execs instantaneous reporting on the precise status of each individual batch of French fries. And there’s Ford’s “Everest” procurement system, a five-year, several-hundred-million-dollar black hole. It’s tempting to view the multitude of monster projects gone bad as anomalies, excrescences of corporate and government bureaucracies run amok. But you will find similar tales of woe emerging from software projects big and small, public and private, old and new.


pages: 452 words: 150,785

Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales From the World of Wall Street by John Brooks

banking crisis, belling the cat, Bretton Woods, business climate, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cuban missile crisis, Ford paid five dollars a day, Gunnar Myrdal, invention of the wheel, large denomination, lateral thinking, margin call, Marshall McLuhan, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, short selling, special drawing rights, Suez crisis 1956, tulip mania, upwardly mobile, very high income

Breech, the executive vice-president, that studies be undertaken concerning the wisdom of putting on the market a new and wholly different medium-priced car. The studies were undertaken. There appeared to be good reason for them. It was a well-known practice at the time for low-income owners of Fords, Plymouths, and Chevrolets to turn in their symbols of inferior caste as soon as their earnings rose above five thousand dollars a year, and “trade up” to a medium-priced car. From Ford’s point of view, this would have been all well and good except that, for some reason, Ford owners usually traded up not to Mercury, the company’s only medium-priced car, but to one or another of the medium-priced cars put out by its big rivals—Oldsmobile, Buick, and Pontiac, among the General Motors products, and, to a lesser extent, Dodge and De Soto, the Chrysler candidates.


pages: 626 words: 167,836

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation by Carl Benedikt Frey

3D printing, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, deskilling, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, full employment, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, machine translation, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nowcasting, oil shock, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, pink-collar, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, safety bicycle, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Turing test, union organizing, universal basic income, warehouse automation, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

At the Ford Motor Company, the cost of constantly training new workers, as many others left the company for better jobs elsewhere, prompted action. To keep its workers, the company introduced the five-dollar-a-day wage, effectively doubling the wages of the employees working in its factories. Since Ford accounted for almost half of the American production of automobiles, increasing the wage to five dollars a day can justly be regarded as “the most dramatic event in the history of wages.”30 In addition to raising wages, Ford also introduced a new welfare program for its workers, and companies like Procter and Gamble, General Electric, and Goodyear Tire soon followed suit, institutionalizing similar programs that returned some of the productivity gains to employees in terms of better wages, medical services, pension plans, and so forth.


pages: 440 words: 132,685

The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World by Randall E. Stross

Albert Einstein, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, cotton gin, death of newspapers, distributed generation, East Village, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Livingstone, I presume, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, plutocrats, Saturday Night Live, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, urban renewal, vertical integration, world market for maybe five computers

In January 1914, Ford announced that he planned within the year to begin manufacturing an electric car using a lightweight battery that Edison had been preparing for some time. Ford told reporters, “I think Mr. Edison is the greatest man in the world and I guess everyone does.” Ford, who had also just announced the adoption of the “Five-Dollar Day,” effectively doubling the wages of virtually all of his workers, was at this historical moment the single most influential businessperson in the country. The New York newspapers, however, had not realized it. When they reported on the plans for the Ford-Edison electric car, they mostly paid compliments to Edison.



pages: 538 words: 138,544

The Story of Stuff: The Impact of Overconsumption on the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health-And How We Can Make It Better by Annie Leonard

air freight, banking crisis, big-box store, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, business logic, California gold rush, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, cotton gin, dematerialisation, employer provided health coverage, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, Firefox, Food sovereignty, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, global supply chain, Global Witness, income inequality, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, intermodal, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, liberation theology, McMansion, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, renewable energy credits, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TED Talk, the built environment, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, union organizing, Wall-E, Whole Earth Review, Zipcar

Ford’s theories of mass production have been so influential that they are widely referred to as Fordism, but what many people don’t realize is that the assembly line piece of it is only half of the story. As much as it involved increasing mass production, Fordism was equally concerned with facilitating mass consumption because, as Ford realized, producers can’t keep churning out all this Stuff unless someone is going to buy it. In 1914, Ford took the unprecedented step of voluntarily doubling his workers’ salaries to five dollars a day (equivalent to just over one hundred dollars a day in 2008 dollars). He also decreased the workday from nine to eight hours. His reward: lower worker turnover, the ability to run three shifts a day instead of two, and greater car sales as the workers themselves joined his customer base.


pages: 378 words: 102,966

Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic by John de Graaf, David Wann, Thomas H Naylor, David Horsey

Abraham Maslow, big-box store, carbon tax, classic study, Community Supported Agriculture, Corrections Corporation of America, Dennis Tito, disinformation, Donald Trump, Exxon Valdez, financial independence, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, God and Mammon, greed is good, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, low interest rates, Mark Shuttleworth, McMansion, medical malpractice, new economy, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Peter Calthorpe, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, Ray Oldenburg, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, space junk, SpaceShipOne, systems thinking, The Great Good Place, trade route, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra, young professional

Products were made to last only a short time so that they would have to be replaced frequently (adding to sales), or they were continually upgraded, more commonly in style than in quality. It was an idea that began long before World War II with Gillette disposable razors, and it soon took on a larger life. Henry Ford, who helped start the ’20s consumer boom by paying his workers a then-fantastic five dollars a day, was a bit of a conservative about style, once promising that consumers could have one of his famous Model T’s in any color as long as it was black. But just before the Great Depression, General Motors introduced the idea of the annual model change.



pages: 976 words: 235,576

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite by Daniel Markovits

8-hour work day, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, algorithmic management, Amazon Robotics, Anton Chekhov, asset-backed security, assortative mating, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Emanuel Derman, equity premium, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, medical residency, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, Myron Scholes, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, savings glut, school choice, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, stakhanovite, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, traveling salesman, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero-sum game


pages: 428 words: 138,235

pages: 801 words: 209,348

Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism by Bhu Srinivasan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, punch-card reader, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Refusing to make anything for any foreign military, as it appeared he was doing, Ford pulled out. Knudsen implored Ford to keep his word, but he made a mistake by invoking Roosevelt’s pleasure at Ford’s initial consent. Knudsen left empty-handed and enraged. The New Deal had been especially tough for Ford to weather. Once hailed universally as the friend of labor with his five-dollar day, he had found himself in a losing battle with unions throughout the 1930s. He blamed Roosevelt’s union policies for severing his direct connection to his labor force. Now his life’s work, his plants and method of manufacture, were being summoned by the government for a cause he didn’t believe in.


Americana by Bhu Srinivasan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, punch-card reader, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Refusing to make anything for any foreign military, as it appeared he was doing, Ford pulled out. Knudsen implored Ford to keep his word, but he made a mistake by invoking Roosevelt’s pleasure at Ford’s initial consent. Knudsen left empty-handed and enraged. The New Deal had been especially tough for Ford to weather. Once hailed universally as the friend of labor with his five-dollar day, he had found himself in a losing battle with unions throughout the 1930s. He blamed Roosevelt’s union policies for severing his direct connection to his labor force. Now his life’s work, his plants and method of manufacture, were being summoned by the government for a cause he didn’t believe in.


pages: 926 words: 312,419

pages: 1,073 words: 314,528

Strategy: A History by Lawrence Freedman

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Blue Ocean Strategy, British Empire, business process, butterfly effect, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, circulation of elites, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, collective bargaining, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, defense in depth, desegregation, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, escalation ladder, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, framing effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Ida Tarbell, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, lateral thinking, linear programming, loose coupling, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mental accounting, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Nelson Mandela, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, scientific management, seminal paper, shareholder value, social contagion, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Torches of Freedom, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, ultimatum game, unemployed young men, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game