Conversation

Notices

1. Embed this notice
   Davi Ottenheimer (flyingpenguin@infosec.exchange)'s status on Sunday, 31-May-2026 22:12:30 JST Davi Ottenheimer

   in reply to

   • Simon Brooke

   @simon_brooke the myth is not just wrong, it is mathematically illiterate. Ford's own workers were a rounding error in the car market. No firm manufactures its own demand by overpaying its workforce, because it loses money on every unit it sells back to the people it just paid.

   Ford was a tyrant in 1913 who burned over 50,000 hires just to hold 14,000 jobs. Turnover was at 370% and daily absenteeism 10%, because of his unbearable line and staff walked. The entire context for a January 1914 wage jump, that roughly doubled pay, was to collapse his quit rate almost overnight. (1987 paper: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w2101/w2101.pdf). And it depended on Ford's Sociological Department, which sent investigators into workers' homes to police their english language skills, drinking, their finances, their domestic arrangements.

   The Ford myth hides the externality. It's a myth. The real man behind it pumped racist hate propaganda through his car dealer network in the twenties, had his portrait in Hitler's office, took a Nazi medal in 1938, and fought his own workers so hard that by 1941 they were marching on his plant with placards reading FORD = HITLER.

   • Embed this notice
     Simon Brooke (simon_brooke@mastodon.scot)'s status on Sunday, 31-May-2026 22:12:31 JST Simon Brooke

     "Henry Ford understood, perhaps apocryphally but correctly in principle, that his workers needed to earn enough to buy his cars. The AI economy is eliminating the workers and expecting the cars to keep selling" -- Owen McGrann

     #GenAI

     https://www.owenmcgrann.com/p/the-dead-economy-theory

     Aral Balkan repeated this.