Human Scale Part II - Mass Production
This is a review of Kirkpatrick Sale's Human Scale, continuing from Part I, Planned Obsolescence. Again, Although I'm sympathetic to the overall thrust of the argument, I think there are a few problems that don't seem to be entirely fatal flaws. In fact, I think libertarians and leftists alike should enjoy it since much of it is aimed at that nexus between corporate and government that we love to hate (what is the best word or phrase for that, anyhow?).
Mass-production = expensive and low quality
This is another theme that runs throughout the book, though in some places Sale contradicts himself on the expense part of the argument. On the quality side, Sale usually poses a false dilemma between low quality mass production and high quality artisanship. He is wrong to imply that mass production means everywhere and always "low quality".
Because of this bias, he not only makes wild generalizations, but also misses some specifics. He claims "In a contemporary handcrafted shirt, for example, which is always made out of natural fabrics, there are at least thirty stitches to the inch rather than the ten or twelve stitches found in factory-mades, and shell buttons instead of plastics." This isn't even close to accurate, according to my source, who actually used the word "lie" when asked about it. 30 stitches per inch would on the one hand be commensurate with embroidery, which is not the same as a seam. At the same time, using stitch counts that high would make the article less reliable because it would create a weak point. In fact, commercially made garments are usually much better than homemade, though I would not dare claim that to be always and everywhere true. It is simply a myth that commercial apparel production means low quality, exploitive, and non-sustainable industry; dispelling that myth is a topic to which a book and a whole blog is dedicated (see previous link).
Human Scale (1980) was written without reference to how badly the Japanese production methods (especially those of Toyota, but also Honda) were beating American mass production methods at the time. That became obvious through both of the 1970s oil crises, and is becoming a factor again today. What Sale failed to appreciate is that the Japanese method (derived more from Fordism than from Taylorism, and almost diametrically opposed to the Sloan method that Sale is almost certainly thinking of as "mass production") allows the production of higher quality articles at lower prices.
In another section, Sale claims that a small number of people could locally manufacture all or most of the products we use today. He does so by listing 13 major industries and the number of people in an average size factory in each. He either does not realize, or does not wish the reader to realize, that each industry does not manufacture all of the products within that category in a single factory. Thus, for the electrical appliance industry, he only lists one factory, though the industry consists of washing machines, dryers, stoves, refrigerators, irons, clocks, stereos, telephones, faxes, lamps, toasters, mixers, coffee pots, food processors, grills, and so on. The metal industry includes steel mills, aluminum works, copper works, etc. You can't use generic miners to mine copper, steel, coal, bauxite, iron, lead, tin, silica, tungsten, and so on - you have to have different miners for each mine, especially since all mines are not likely to be located within one county. His calculations are surely off by an order of magnitude. This is misleading, but it can be salvaged in a way that Sale least expects.
In the chapter entitled Lucca's Law, Sale makes his case for going "Back to the Pleistocene!" (an EarthFirst! slogan). It demonstrates how little he actually understood what was happening in manufacturing (especially automobile) at the time. He says that self-sufficiency could be achieved "[b]y using general instead of specialized machines" and in another passage in which Sale describes necessity as being the mother of invention, but self-sufficiency as the grandmother, he talks about using general factories gearing up to make production runs first in one type of product and then another:
The Sale method (the slightly modified Sloan/GM method) would require extensive warehouses to store the mass-produced production runs (since you run a year's worth of production for those two months and have to store it for the remaining 10 months). If problems were discovered months later, the only recourse would be to wait for the next production run (months later). If too many light bulbs were made, or designs were changed, all those bulbs would be waste. And of course you can forget about producing perishables this way. The JIT method would be to run a few lightbulbs, a couple of irons, a stove, and a refrigerator every hour, switching between them as customer demand dictated. No warehouse needed, just take it straight to the customer. If problems are discovered, the next batch can be held until the problems are solved, and a new batch will be forthcoming later in the shift or during a later shift. If designs or tastes change, there is no waste because you only produce as customers demand. Sloanist mass production can't do it because it favors large batches and local optimization, but JIT favors small batches and global optimization.
So, long after he has argued that mass production is inefficient, he casually acknowledges the logic of mass production and then genuflects at the principles of the Toyota Production System before prostrating himself before the very worst example of mass production (Sloanism and GM). I think that his unfortunate bias against manufacturing blinds him to the fact that - unless we are prepared to return to hunting and gathering - ultimately humans have to make stuff in order to survive. Given that, it seems that it would be best to discover the underlying principles for efficient (low waste) manufacturing instead of ridiculing them.
Mass-production = expensive and low quality
This is another theme that runs throughout the book, though in some places Sale contradicts himself on the expense part of the argument. On the quality side, Sale usually poses a false dilemma between low quality mass production and high quality artisanship. He is wrong to imply that mass production means everywhere and always "low quality".
Because of this bias, he not only makes wild generalizations, but also misses some specifics. He claims "In a contemporary handcrafted shirt, for example, which is always made out of natural fabrics, there are at least thirty stitches to the inch rather than the ten or twelve stitches found in factory-mades, and shell buttons instead of plastics." This isn't even close to accurate, according to my source, who actually used the word "lie" when asked about it. 30 stitches per inch would on the one hand be commensurate with embroidery, which is not the same as a seam. At the same time, using stitch counts that high would make the article less reliable because it would create a weak point. In fact, commercially made garments are usually much better than homemade, though I would not dare claim that to be always and everywhere true. It is simply a myth that commercial apparel production means low quality, exploitive, and non-sustainable industry; dispelling that myth is a topic to which a book and a whole blog is dedicated (see previous link).
Human Scale (1980) was written without reference to how badly the Japanese production methods (especially those of Toyota, but also Honda) were beating American mass production methods at the time. That became obvious through both of the 1970s oil crises, and is becoming a factor again today. What Sale failed to appreciate is that the Japanese method (derived more from Fordism than from Taylorism, and almost diametrically opposed to the Sloan method that Sale is almost certainly thinking of as "mass production") allows the production of higher quality articles at lower prices.
In another section, Sale claims that a small number of people could locally manufacture all or most of the products we use today. He does so by listing 13 major industries and the number of people in an average size factory in each. He either does not realize, or does not wish the reader to realize, that each industry does not manufacture all of the products within that category in a single factory. Thus, for the electrical appliance industry, he only lists one factory, though the industry consists of washing machines, dryers, stoves, refrigerators, irons, clocks, stereos, telephones, faxes, lamps, toasters, mixers, coffee pots, food processors, grills, and so on. The metal industry includes steel mills, aluminum works, copper works, etc. You can't use generic miners to mine copper, steel, coal, bauxite, iron, lead, tin, silica, tungsten, and so on - you have to have different miners for each mine, especially since all mines are not likely to be located within one county. His calculations are surely off by an order of magnitude. This is misleading, but it can be salvaged in a way that Sale least expects.
In the chapter entitled Lucca's Law, Sale makes his case for going "Back to the Pleistocene!" (an EarthFirst! slogan). It demonstrates how little he actually understood what was happening in manufacturing (especially automobile) at the time. He says that self-sufficiency could be achieved "[b]y using general instead of specialized machines" and in another passage in which Sale describes necessity as being the mother of invention, but self-sufficiency as the grandmother, he talks about using general factories gearing up to make production runs first in one type of product and then another:
For certain high volume items - nails, say, or pencils - it would be possible to get mass-production efficiencies by gearing a plant for a month or two to a single product, which would then be stored and used as needed, and then retooling it to make some other allied product for a month or two. This would never be quite as cheap and efficient as straight-through mass production, of course, but it would enable the total community manufacturing capacity to double and triple and more, and thus to multiple the number of goods with the same limited number of manufacturing workers. [emphasis added]That passage comes long after he talks about the number of workers in each, but this new twist about each type of appliance comes much later, almost as an afterthought, by which time he drops the talk of the numbers of people required. Taiichi Ohno would laugh himself silly at the thought of someone toying with the idea 20 years after he had perfected it. Ohno's development of Toyota's Just-In-Time method was born exactly out of such circumstances, when Toyota was a small, intimate factory in a beaten country and could not afford the variety and number of machines used in such places as Ford and GM. Ohno pushed, and Shingo later perfected, the idea of Just-In-Time by using Single Minute Exchange of Dies (SMED), making a mockery of a month-long changeover. The idea is to use general machines (e.g. presses) in specialized ways (different dies for each stamping) and to vary the product mix on the assembly line so that you make some of every product every day.
The Sale method (the slightly modified Sloan/GM method) would require extensive warehouses to store the mass-produced production runs (since you run a year's worth of production for those two months and have to store it for the remaining 10 months). If problems were discovered months later, the only recourse would be to wait for the next production run (months later). If too many light bulbs were made, or designs were changed, all those bulbs would be waste. And of course you can forget about producing perishables this way. The JIT method would be to run a few lightbulbs, a couple of irons, a stove, and a refrigerator every hour, switching between them as customer demand dictated. No warehouse needed, just take it straight to the customer. If problems are discovered, the next batch can be held until the problems are solved, and a new batch will be forthcoming later in the shift or during a later shift. If designs or tastes change, there is no waste because you only produce as customers demand. Sloanist mass production can't do it because it favors large batches and local optimization, but JIT favors small batches and global optimization.
So, long after he has argued that mass production is inefficient, he casually acknowledges the logic of mass production and then genuflects at the principles of the Toyota Production System before prostrating himself before the very worst example of mass production (Sloanism and GM). I think that his unfortunate bias against manufacturing blinds him to the fact that - unless we are prepared to return to hunting and gathering - ultimately humans have to make stuff in order to survive. Given that, it seems that it would be best to discover the underlying principles for efficient (low waste) manufacturing instead of ridiculing them.
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