Re: the share held by banks

["stephen block" <stephenb@xxxxxxxx>]

Title: Re: the share held by banks

Seymour Mellman of course explores this in great depth and detail in his fairly well-known book on the decline of "yankee know-how", and specifically in relation to the machine tools industry. In case you are unaware of this work it is entitled _Profits Without Production_ and he has a chapter in it entitled "How the Yankees Lost Their Know-how". The thesis he explicates, one I found convincing at the time, was that indeed the quality versus quantity drama overtakes the US toolmaking industry with Asian producers providing low quality but low cost machine tools effectively undermining the US industry. But there are many other factors he explores including the fact that US companies found ways of making paper profits and then real profits without producing, leading of course to de-industialization, the equities market mania and investment in non labour-intensive enterprises. I've left much out, but the point is that, as Mellman says, there are specific changes in US production, and most importantly management techniques, that get taken up and imitated by the Japanese but that ultimately it was American industry, through its drive for easy profits without the usual pitfalls of ownership and management of an enterprise, which opened the door for the US to be undermined by inferior quality material. And this does not even address the fact that so many jobs were deliberately exported to Asia by US firms, to save on labour costs.

See also the work of Jack Barbash e.g.:  Barbash, Jack. "The New Industrial Relations in the US Phase II." Industrial Relations/Relations Industrielles.  43 (1) (1988): 32-42

S Block

 

The point is not to establish a sinister "us versus them" scenario.
The American and Japanese manufacturing sectors each face demand curves from their own consumers that are falling in respect of their costs of production.  The general case is that this is true for every national economy, which sets in motion a struggle for markets between nations that no-one can ultimately win.  In this synthetic struggle for survival people do things they shouldn't do and otherwise wouldn't do.  And it is all so pointless, for what they are fighting for are simply numbers that can be written down into account books.  It is a foolish game.  But in the process the things that really count are degraded more and more.