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:

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.

Human Scale Part I - Planned Obsolesence

Having just finished Kirkpatrick Sale's Human Scale, I thought I might post my impressions. Although I'm sympathetic to the overall thrust of the argument, I think there are a few problems. Perhaps they are just with this book and the fact that some of it is dated. In any case, they don't seem to be entirely fatal flaws, but should be noted nonetheless.

Planned Obsolescence

This is a minor thread that runs throughout the book, usually in the background. It is one of Sale's fundamental assumptions about state capitalism. In one case, he describes the Century light bulb, about which I have already written. In other cases, he writes about the planned obsolesence of appliances such as refrigerators, with the implication that they are built that way to force you to buy more often. Let's take the lightbulb first.

The Century bulb is still running today in a firestation in Livermore, CA (the webcam is here). The bulb is never turned off, and for good reason: most (99%) lightbulbs don't burn out in normal operation, they pop during the first few milliseconds of being turned on. The current inrush creates a heat differential and therefore rapid and uneven expansion of the filament, causing it to pull itself apart. Thus, if you never turn it off, you never have to risk turning it on cold. The Century bulb itself is somewhat special, too. At 4 W, you can barely see it even when the other lights are off. This is so because the filament is huge.

You could obviously make bulbs last longer through a variety of techniques: thicker envelope, thicker filament, better evacuation, electronics to control the inrush current. The question is whether the changes are worth the extra cost. One $0.50 bulb every 2 years is no more economical than a $1 bulb every four years. Indeed, as the price of most goods declines in terms of the amount of work required to earn the money to buy them, even that simple comparison works out in favor of the shorter bulb over time.

The other claim - that appliances could be made to last longer but are intentionally not - is based on two mistakes. The first is based on a misunderstanding of statistical quality control (SQC). We can, after analyzing lots of appliances over time, figure out that an appliance will fail in a predictable manner. The failure probability looks like a bell curve. From that, we can say that Refrigerator X will last on average Y years. From this, people will infer that the refrigerator was designed to fail in Y years. In a sense, it was, since the refrigerator was designed within certain constraints: existing technology, cost points, market demand, competitive expectations, cost of inputs including capital and materials, etc. The end result of those design choices is a refrigerator that lasts, on average, Y years. But the direction of causality is from the design to the durability, not from a selected goal of durability to the design. This is a misapplication of statistics, and is usually committed either out of malice or ignorance. I'll assume Sale does so out of the latter.

The other mistake is the idea that people should design 50 year refrigerators (or whatever). Keep in mind that you can, right now, buy outstanding appliances from companies like Viking. They are very expensive. At the same time, keep in mind the fact that technology is changing and that the rate of change is increasing. Given both of those, why would you want to pay extra for something that will be overtaken by scientific and engineering - not design - obsolescence within a few years? The examples are mind-boggling: a car radio of a few years ago does not have as good reception, disc capability, or perhaps even cassette playback capability; the incandescent lightbulb has been overtaken by the CFL and is about to be overtaken by the LED; a state-of-the-art computer from 1990 won't even begin to approach the capability of a modern computer for most of the modern applications (such as the internet, USB, etc.); the most economical and reliable car from 1975 won't even touch the most economical and reliable modern car for either of those measures or for safety (remember when airbags were only available on high-end Mercedes?). So why would anyone pay a premium for that which they could have in the future at a deep discount? Now, Sale would probably claim that all of those are examples of products designed to function within the state capitalist system, but what about that panacea of solar panels? The efficiency was pitifully low in 1980 (when Human Scale was written) - were they planned to be obsolete? Isn't it good that the efficiency of commercial units is as high as 20% today? They have lab experiments returning 30% efficiency - don't you want that in the future?

Anonymity and introspection

This may seem rather obvious.

My wife is a public person. She is careful about what she says because she assumes, what with Google and other modern search tools, that whatever she says is easily attributable to her. Likewise, I personally have always been careful to say what I mean and to mean what I say. You could say that we are both engaging in self-censorship, being always careful to keep unpalatable ideas to ourselves. Intelligence services are said to operate under the principle that they should be willing to face the consequences when they are caught, not if they are caught - that seems to be a prudent rule.

On the other hand, it could be that such realizations make us more likely to constantly evaluate ourselves, to make sure not only that we don't let slip with particularly indefensible ideas, but also that we do not hold them. I can't speak for her, but I find that I am constantly checking my ideas against (for lack of a better term) Adam Smith's "impartial spectator". It is worthwhile to seek out contrarian views for a better trial of my own views in the same way that the American court systems prefer the adversarial rather than the cooperative search for truth or justice. Of course, my own methods may suffer from similar problems, or it may not be as efficient at arguing the opposing view.

Is the internet the ultimate Panopticon for those who participate through newsgroups, blogs, and comments? If so, is that necessarily a bad thing? They do, after all, participate by choice. There are at least two views of this idea of a social control, of which the panopticon is an extreme example: one that it suppresses and reduces freedom, the other that it only suppresses and reduces the darker side of human nature. If the former, who benefits? That is a power argument. If the latter, do we all benefit? Equally? In any case, that is a utilitarian argument. I'm not sure I buy either.

Returning to the point, it seems to me that lack of anonymity may lead to greater introspection, but not necessarily. The President, after all, is in a fishbowl, but seems to find insulation from the negative consequences and does not appear to engage in a great deal of introspection. Or perhaps he does and we aren't aware of it. A Reagan biography that came out a few years ago detailed how he agonized over some of his public statements and actions, especially in his public debate with his daughter over nuclear weapons. Reagan was the California governor who legalized abortion in that state, but later wrote a book explaining why he thought abortion was harmful. Those aren't the actions of a man lacking introspection. Is that then a left-wing myth: that Democrats are thoughtful and appeal to reason while Republicans shoot from the hip and appeal to emotion? Is the corresponding right-wing myth that Republicans operate on proven principles and convictions (tradition) while Democrats are nihilists who pander to the current state of mass opinion? Or is the truth close to: both sides hold certain convictions (right or wrong), but both attempt to exploit widespread emotions as they are revealed in order to expand their own power?

The opposite seems easier to prove and to accept: anonymity leads to lack of introspection. Drive-by posters on newsgroups, drive-by commenters on blogs. On the other hand, anonymity enables whistle-blowers. The anonymity doesn't lead to their introspection, but it does allow them to share with the public those lessons learned through introspection.

I therefore favor an easy mixture of non-anonymity and anonymity. Anonymity allows people to speak truth to power without fear of retribution, but non-anonymity lends weight to public statements because it requires a certain amount of courage. It signals introspection. Gandhi achieved greater goals faster with public demonstrations than he would have with anonymous bomb-throwing.

State-corporate nexus

There should be a single term that describes the nexus of corporate and government interests. Many socialists, libertarians, mutualists, anarchists, and otherists will agree that a large share of our problems comes neither just from corporations (though also from them) nor just from government (though also from them), but particularly from the clash or alignment of interests, the nexus between them. While Marxists look for the dissolution of corporations, libertarians generally advocate for the reduction of the government sphere since, of the two, the government is the more dangerous. Each has its own power, but government is the only true wielder of force, violence, and coercion, and the corporation only accesses that through the state. The state can always access economic power through coercive taxation.

The most obvious case of that nexus, that of corporate welfare, is universally denounced by both citizens and politicians, but ubiquitously practiced by both major political parties (or both wings of the single major party, if you prefer). Less obvious cases are those regulations which appear to work against corporate interests, but actually serve to further some at the expense of others; for example, Wal-Mart's recent support for an increase in the minimum wage in order to keep their competitors at a disadvantage. We are all also familiar with sweetheart deals and no-bid contracts.

It is therefore unfortunate that there is no satisfactory, pithy, accurate, succinct single word that conveys the idea of the nexus itself. A few that come close, or that address the problem lack the precision (and concision? is that a word) are:

• Corporate welfare - This is an outcome, not a description of the phenomenon.
  
• State capitalism - It misses because it exploits dual nature of meaning of "capitalist" and somehow implies a link between capitalism and its opposite. Sometimes that is the intent of those using it. In case the reader is unaware, capitalist means both someone who makes a living on the rent of money (capital) and someone who advocates laissez faire economic policy. Ted Turner is the former but not the latter, I am the latter but not the former. By saying, "Ted Turner advocates thus-and-such, and Ted Turner is a capitalist," it is sometimes intended to imply that capitalists of the latter type favor the kinds of things that Ted Turner favors, which is silly.
  
• Corporative - This is a little obscure and archaic, but it comes close. After all, capital exists even in a communist society, though it may be underutilized, but corporations are a legal fiction, an offspring of the state. Corporatives in Italy (and for a time in America) were essentially guilds organized for the purpose of self-regulation. They were allowed to issue licenses to participate in their particular industry, to set maximum and minimum prices, and to negotiate with the labor guilds. It has the added benefit that the idea was successfully implemented by Mussolini and FDR, thus underlining the fact that such ideas are limited to neither the traditional left nor the traditional right (overlooking Mussolini's Marxist upbringing for the moment).
  
• Regulatory Capture - Another outcome, but a successful neologism would have to capture this aspect of the nexus, something that Corporative misses. Regulatory capture is the idea that regulated industries will soon gain control of the regulating body by one means or another. This is thought to be an unfortunate corruption of the regulatory system that can be prevented by righteous voting, but the history is such that it seems to be a natural but unintended consequence. The best background reading on regulatory capture are Gabriel Kolko's books, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916, and Railroads and Regulation, 1877-1916. In those books, Kolko, a self-described socialist historian, argues that the supposed triumphs of the Progressive Era were exactly the opposite, that in fact the legislation that was supposedly written to contain the trusts over their protests were in fact requested by them in order to suppress competition. That was especially so for the railroad industry, which tried for years to stop the competition-driven rate reductions that were driving them all into bankruptcy first by cartelization then by regulation. Even this fails to capture the other aspect of capture, which is that regulated industries have concentrated interests in the outcome of regulatory rule-making processes, while the public's interests are diffuse. There is a public good problem which leads to rational ignorance on the part of voters and legislators. As a result, the regulated industries manage to influence the outcomes by a variety of means, including trading company officers to the regulatory boards and vice versa.
• Rent seeking - This would seem to capture some of the ideas above (corporate welfare and regulatory capture), but rent-seeking isn't restricted to businesses or governments. An employee who withholds critical information to maintain his job security is a rent seeker.
  

Perhaps we should follow the German example and simply graft words together, such as commoninterestofcorporationandgovernment? Combinationofeconomicandpoliticalpower? Paternalcorporativelink? Seriously, "corporative patronage"?

New Ideas

The great thing about books is that sometimes they present new ideas or new arguments for old ideas. Those in the latter category are sometimes a guilty pleasure because you know you're succumbing to confirmation bias, so I try not to be too enthusiastic about them. This is in line with the conviction that wisdom comes from holding "strong opinions, which are weakly held" (via MarginalRevolution). Those in the former category (new ideas) can be a much more emotional experience ... hence the temptation to read a broad variety.

My wife used to keep a sign next to her desk that attributed to Howard Aiken the statement, "Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats". This seems true of my personal experience in acquiring new ideas, even when I go looking for them. I have tentatively broken the process down into 6 steps [Update: I originally said 5 but listed 6, because I was still developing the idea while writing, testament to the sketchiness of this whole "theory"], which seem to me analogous to the Kübler-Ross model of dying. They are skepticism, outright resistance, reconsideration, acceptance, enlightened skepticism, and integration. I'm no psychologist and this is not based on any formal analysis, so it would not surprise me to find out that someone has already written extensively about this. And that they had done a much better job.

Skepticism - At this stage, the idea seems far-fetched. You are open to it, but all of the arguments and sources are new to you. There is no resonance because you don't have the author's background and influences.

Outright resistance - At this stage, you are actively resisting the ideas. You note that the arguments gloss over or ignore counterarguments, that the sources are obscure and suspect.

Reconsideration - I think this is the result of introducing these ideas into your subconscious memory, and why a long, involved book is better for introducing radical arguments than a short one. If it takes several days to read the book, you find that you are thinking about it even when you are away from the book. The longer it takes, the more likely you are to encounter news stories, examples in daily life, and other things that create resonance.

Acceptance - You have learned to accept some of the major premises of the argument. In fact, you may even be enthusiastic about the ideas, seeing how they apply regularly rather than rarely. This is the enthusiasm of the recent convert.

Enlightened skepticism - At this point, you have come to understand some of the ideas, but upon further inspection have recognized both the faults and the strengths. Depending on the size of the book and nature of your reading schedule, you may actually enter into this stage while still reading or some time after completing the book.

Integration - This rarely occurs while I am still reading a book; typically, this happens long after completing it. I find, however, that I don't fully integrate something until I've had a chance to argue in favor of it. At that time, someone may point out shortcomings in your own critical analysis, forcing you to go back and reconsider it, or learn it better. As with everything, learning something well enough to teach it is far more valuable than learning just enough to claim to know it. You may still integrate something even when you largely disagree with the author's main theme. For example, very few people who cite Schumpeter's "creative destruction" from Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy actually accept the major argument in that book, that capitalism would soon collapse from lack of investment opportunities (it was written in 1942).

Howard Gardner's Changing Minds; The Art and Science of Changing Our Own and Other People's Minds is about the levers needed to change people's minds in different settings. Those settings range from the national/political, to the scientific, and to the self. He identifies 7 such levers (quoted from the book's press release)

1. Reason (making logical arguments)
2. Research (presenting factual data)
3. Resonance (connecting with an individual’s or group’s emotional or spiritual core)
4. Representational redescriptions (presenting the same idea in multiple formats, reflecting our various intelligences)
5. Resources and rewards (offering positive or negative reinforcement)
6. Real world events (leveraging happenings that are out of your control)
7. Resistances (identifying and countering longstanding, contrary beliefs)

Obviously, when reading books for myself, the context is changing my own mind. The levers that are most effective are reason and research, which must counter the resistances, my previously held beliefs. In stage 3 (Reconsideration), real world events and resonance are in play, also working on my resistances. The wisdom of "strong opinions, which are weakly held" is to know the reason and research behind your previously held beliefs, but to be ready to drop that resistance when new reason and new research is made available.

technorati tags: book review psychology bias learning

The Military Origins of Quality Control

While reading Foucault, I found myself constantly asking, "by who?" Foucault's themes include the regulation and disciplining of people, but he never seems to say who is driving the trend. It was surreal - like reading a history of Europe written by Jim Garrison. Garrison, you may recall, was the real-life prosecutor played by Kevin Costner in Oliver Stone's JFK. According to his book, upon which the movie was largely based, the conspiracy included Castro-haters, the New Orleans mob, and dozens of other actors all the way up to Johnny Carson of Tonight Show fame. I'd guess over half the country must have been involved (in which case the assassination was merely a recall vote).

But I digress.

One of Foucault's themes was that the regularization of people for economic production began in the 18th century military, specifically the French army. In Discipline and Punish (from The Foucault Reader, p. 210), he says,

If the economic take-off of the West began with the techniques that made possible the accumulation of capital, it might perhaps be said that the methods for administering the accumulation of men made possible a political take-off in relation to the traditional, ritual, costly, violent forms of power, which soon fell into disuse and were superseded by a subtle, calculated technology of subjection. In fact, the two processes -- the accumulation of men and the accumulation of capital -- cannot be separated [...] The disciplinary pyramid constituted the small cell of power within which the separation, coordination, and supervision of tasks were imposed and made efficient; and analytical partitioning of time, gestures, and bodily forces [EH: Taylorism?] constituted an operation schema that could easily be transferred from the groups to be subjected to the mechanisms of production; the massive projection of military methods onto industrial organization was an example of this modeling of the division of labor following the model laid down by the schemata of power. [emphasis added]

For readers referred here from the Mutualist Blog, it is worth pointing out that Hounshell credits Lewis Mumford of having traced similar themes.

Surprisingly, that is also where my tale of Quality Control begins. Quality control and mass production had its origins in the French Army, jumped to North America in the Revolutionary War and its aftermath, and finally culminates in Fordism and Taylorism. At that point, it gave birth to the statistical science of QC in the 1930s which made its way to Japan in the post-war era. WWII also gave birth to continuous improvement, which also migrated to Japan in the post-war era. Both of these movements came back to the US in part through the US Navy, though also clearly through the automobile industry. Finally, some of the ideas which had taken hold in the military culminated in a document which - though abandoned by the US Army - became influential on European industry and finally became the bureaucratic nightmare known as ISO 9000.

For the first part of this, I will draw largely upon David Hounshell's excellent From The American System to Mass Production: 1800-1932. In it, he describes the French origin of the idea that if the parts of weapons were made interchangeable, they would be more economical to make to make and easier to repair. According to Hounshell, French General Jean-Baptiste de Gribeauval "has been convincingly identified as the principal originator of this plan, which in fact had been known for a long time in France as "le système Gribeauval." It seems that Gribeauval had provided patronage to a certain Honoré Blanc to attempt to produce uniform musket locks. Ultimately, he never succeeded, but his friend, an American by the name of Thomas Jefferson, sent Blanc's ideas and memoirs to War Department Secretary Henry Knox. A second channel for the introduction of the idea was through French engineer, artillerist, and de Gribeauval student Major Louis de Tousard. After serving under Lafayette in the Revolution, Tousard joined the Corps of Artillerists and Engineers where he began teaching. He eventually wrote two books: one a proposal for a military school which he sent to the new Secretary of War, James McHenry, who used it as the "blueprint" for West Point, and the other on military principals which became the standard textbook for military officers. Hounshell says, "The importance of Tousard's book, as well as his informal teaching of officers in the Corps of Artilllerists and Engineers, cannot be overemphasized." He summarizes,

Thomas Jefferson's enthusiasm for Honoré Blanc's experiments with the manufacture of interchangeable musket parts and the influence on the American military of the rationalism of General Gribeauval and his followers firmly established the intellectual and institutional basis for the rise of the American system of arms production. The pure rationalism of "system and uniformity" provided an adequate incentive for the pursuit of this goal. The United States War Department soon found the idea of interchangeability irresistible, and through its own armories and through private arms contracts it encouraged and supported attempts to achieve this end. Eventually the War Department demanded interchangeability. Ordnance officers elevated the idea of interchangeability to an ideal and helped to transform it into a reality. [emphasis in original]

Still, despite legends about contractor Eli Whitney's invention of the method (as evidenced by the Wiki entry, which I will soon correct), Whitney himself never actually achieved it either. Arms manufacturers worked at the idea at the federal armories in Springfield and Harper's Ferry without much success. Finally, an inside contractor machinist named John H. Hall worked out the final solution in the 1820s. Drawing on the work of his predecessors, especially Simeon North and his use of a master model, Hall worked out a system of gauges and jigs or "rational fixtures". The real trick was to keep close watch on those gauges to make sure they are still in specification or tolerance. We can see in this the basic science of statistical quality control, the science of figuring out how much error is acceptable. Hounshell takes this story all the way to the pinnacle of mass production, the Ford system for manufacturing the Model T. In the remainder of the story, it is astounding how many companies thought to have developed components of mass production - especially Singer and McCormick - first brought in machinists trained in one of the arms manufacturers to show them how to obtain regularity.

The other side of this story begins when W. Edwards Deming learned of statistical process control from Walter Shewhart. After applying the methods to the 1940 census, Deming was brought to Japan by Gen. Douglass Macarthur's Japanese Occupational Force to help with the 1951 census. While there, he was invited to teach statistical process control methods to the war torn economy there. What is little appreciated, however, is that Macarthur also had access to legions of instructors from the Training Within Industry (TWI) service to help teach modern methods to the Japanese.

TWI was a program created by the War Manpower Commission of the War Department for the purpose of helping manufacturers cope with the fact that they were being asked to ramp up production at the same time many of their employees were being enlisted or drafted into the Armed Forces. TWI consisted of 4 programs: Job Instruction, Job Methods, Job Relations (and another version of this for union officials), and Program Development. Together, these taught what would be recognizable today as standard work and continuous improvement or kaizen. That the Japanese programs brought back into vogue in the US had an American origin is not well known, but also beyond dispute. Maazaki Isai says in Kaizen: The Key to Japan's Competitive Success, "It is well known that the initial concepts of statistical quality control and its managerial implications were brought to Japan by such pioneers as Deming and Juran in the postwar years. Less well known is the fact that the suggestion system was brought to Japan about the same time by TWI (Training Within Industries [sic]) and the U. S. Air Force. In addition, many Japanese executives who visited the United States right after the war learned about the suggestion system and started it at their companies." In the intro to Donald Dinero's Training Within Industry: The Foundation of Lean, John Shook writes about a time when he was working for Toyota when he "protested to my Japanese colleague, declaring that the program as configured just wouldn't do and required radical revision before being unleashed on the NUMMI workforce." His colleague, Toyota Master Trainer Iaso Kato, "stormed out and fetched from a back room file a yellowed, dog-eared, coffee-stained copy of the English-language original training manual, just as he had received it .... To my absolute amazement, the program that Toyota was going to great expense (including retranslating from Japanese to English) to "transfer" to NUMMI was exactly what the Americans had taught the Japanese decades earlier. Of course, it was JI, the Job Instruction module of TWI. Toyota still used it in 1984 and continues to use it today ...." These same points are made in Jim Huntzinger's article, "The Roots of Lean; Training Within Industry: The Origin of Kaizen ". To bring it full circle, the American Society for Quality says that the term "Total Quality Management" was first used by the U.S. Naval Air Systems Command around 1984 "to describe its Japanese-style management approach to quality improvement." (incidentally, most of this paragraph is plagiarized from my own edits from Wikipedia, so I will warn anyone trying to confirm these with an independent authority that those entries in Wikipedia are highly influenced by my own research ~~~~).

The final promised tale is that of the evolution of Army quality specification MIL-Q-9858 (1958). This standard was soon adopted by NATO as AQAP-1 (1969). That in turn was adopted by the British Standards Institute as BS 5750 in 1979, which in turn became the basis of the original ISO 9000 standard in 1987. Thus we have a direct line of descendancy from an American military standard to a protectionist European an international industrial standard in about 30 years. From my understanding, it is just about impossible to fail a certification inspection because they are done by for-profit consultants. As a result, the automotive industry has established their own variant, QS 9000, because they need actual standardization and not lots of paperwork and paper tiger certifications.

Upon realizing that history, my initial response was - in Greg Mankiw's terms - to update my priors in response to this information. Confirmation bias should push me to believe "market good, government bad", but to the extent that I think quality control is desirable (and there are good reasons to believe so: for one thing, quality control means less waste, a very green attitude and confirmed by the chapter on lean production in Natural Capitalism) I have more data to support an alternate hypothesis, "markets not perfect, government usually not always bad". My second response was to realize that the world is both more complex and less complex than normally thought: more complex in the sense that there was global influence long before the present "globalized" era, since these ideas originated in France more than 200 years ago, were perfected in the US between 120 and 100 years ago, were exported to Japan 50 years ago, and are currently being reimported from there; and less complex in the sense that Americans who claim credit for the Industrial Revolution are probably less wrong than their supposedly more cosmopolitan and less chauvinistic neighbors think them to be. My third response was to start to rethink my earlier easy dismissal of Foucault. My fourth was to start integrating this knowledge with what I have gleaned out of Human Scale: that mass production has gone hand-in-hand with the rise of the militarism and the centralized state. Correlation, not causality, but curious correlation nonetheless.

technorati tags: "W. Edwards Deming" "kaizen" "TWI" "Training Within Industry" "ISO 9000" "Michel Foucault" Foucault

Moving the burden, not relieving it

I just finished Gordon Tullock's Public Goods, Redistribution and Rent Seeking. I stumbled across it in the local Community College library and was surprised they would have something like that. I have to say that although it was an easy read, I was not impressed at all. It looks as if nobody edited it, as it was filled with inappropriate commas, words dropped, and extra words added.

As far as the contents go, the first third used "externality" in such a way as to stretch the definition beyond anything useful or even recognizable. The last third mostly goes over the ground covered in The Calculus of Consent, which he co-wrote with James Buchanan (a fact which he reiterates about six times). I therefore only found one chapter, in which he argues that charity and altruism have a biological basis, to be educational.

However, there was a table elsewhere in the book which contained something I had not previously known: during the Depression, the federal government merely took over the payment of unemployment pay from local counties, but did not significantly increase it. This information is derived from research done by Stanley Liebergott (the citation is for American Economy: Income, Wealth and Want, 1976).

Year	% of earnings of common labor
1850	22
1860	26
1870	24
1903	23
1929	31
1940	28
1950	29
1960	28
1970	29

I suppose this resonated with me all the more because I am about 1/3 of the way through Kirkpatrick Sale's Human Scale, where he is making the argument that the nature of government is to increase its own size with little in the way of a balancing benefit to the populace.

As I recall, Mutual Aid societies, as discussed in David Beito's From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State: Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890-1967, paid out much more to those who purchased private unemployment insurance. The difference is not that the government aid is free and the Mutual Aid insurance is not, but that the latter is more transparent and has better (more effective and economical) controls against abuse. Private insurance also carried no stigma, since everyone understood that you were only getting back that for which you had already paid rather than getting a free ride on "someone else's dime" (which is in fact not true since presumably anyone laid off was already paying taxes). And, in Sale's language, mutual aid is on a more human scale because most society members knew one-another.