Is buying American-made cars the solution to our economic problems?

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Permalink Reply by Steve Stuck on July 6, 2009 at 2:26pm

"This pen is made in America, but the ink comes from Brazil and the metal from Canada." - Milton Friedman

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Permalink Reply by Stephen James on July 7, 2009 at 10:48am

Do the American car companies get their steel from American companies? I'm not sure, but protectionism isn't the way to go.

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Permalink Reply by Tripp Babbitt on July 7, 2009 at 9:32pm

No, sometimes sounds appealing . . . but no. Otherwise, we wind up with everyone closing sales to their countries and improvement never follows. Our economic problems are rooted in greed and poorly designed systems of management for manufacturing and service. We have long lost the manufacturing battle to other countries that have surpassed us. It started with Japan and the Japanese Industrial Miracle after WWII with Dr. W. Edwards Deming (A US citizen). We have been reeling in maufacturing ever since. The first crisis occured in the 70s for the Big 3 and they have never been able to compete since.

Our economic problems have more to do with scientific management theory that Deming warned us about. The functional separation of work that FW Taylor touted was a breakthough . . . 100 years ago. But Deming showed that there were better ways of managing an organization using a combination of systems thinking, theory of variation, theory of knowledge and psychology. Service industry is the next battleground and we stand to lose this battle too. Our infatuation with technology, targets, incentives, and other sub-optimization has made us less competitive. I still hear stories of folks at AIG that hit there targets and want their incentives even though the company is for all intent and purpose bankrupt.

The next generation stands to be the first to not live better than the last as we wallow in debt and an inability to grasp the management concepts that are need moving forward. For me, it is systems thinking that I promote in my blog (blog.newsystemsthinking.com) for service industry.

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