Bus 1050 1st Edition Lecture 26 Outline of Last Lecture I Polo from The Travels of Marco Polo II Hamilton Manufactures from The Works of Alexander Hamilton III Wharton from The House of Mirth Outline of Current Lecture II De Tocqueville That Aristocracy May Be Engendered by Manufactures from Democracy in America III Ford from My Life and Work IV Gandhi Man and Machine from All Men Are Brothers V Film Clip Modern Times Current Lecture De Tocqueville Class system Tocqueville envisioned a system where the machines would do what the people would and in essence the people become irrelevant The new aristocracy The bond that kept the aristocrats together because they were given this status by God This was a bond that they could not ignore But the new group was defined by their success and the riches that come with it Pg 480 line 66 Not only are the rich compounded against themselves but they do not communicate with the poor They only have contact in the workplace There is no real sense of commitment from either side But in medieval Europe there was a commitment Geography The bond These notes represent a detailed interpretation of the professor s lecture GradeBuddy is best used as a supplement to your own notes not as a substitute Let s say one s employer lays you off as a riff but you should take unemployment insurance The employer paid premiums to set up unemployment insurance to protect the workers if they re ever laid off Nowadays we provide this temporary safety net because we recognize the harshness of this new system Pg 481 line 5 This system is harsh because there is a lack of concern from the employer to the employee If you were a peasant in the 13th century and lost your position there were no options for new positions But nowadays for the majority of people we do have opportunities that perhaps didn t exist hundreds of years ago Henry Ford From my life and work 1896 was the first automobile he made It was a carriage with an engine under it and a steering wheel It had no shelter from the elements It also had bicycle tires He called it a quadricycle Efficiency If you fail to take advantage of some opportunity to reduce the cost of production it s the same as imposing taxes on yourself His mentality towards people is that people cannot make it on their own He argues that we don t want to put skilled workers in positions where they don t requiretheir skills In other words people how are unskilled to the manual labor Many of them are foreigners and they need money For money they tolerate horrible conditions because they need their physiological needs taken care of Pg 501 If one wants to make a car it s like making a house First one must have a workspace tools parts etc But one spends the most of their time walking about for materials in tools and they don t get paid very much because Ford can t pay them for walking around The fundamental objective is to have robots He really wants robots But the technology had not yet come to be So instead he wanted to turn his workers into robots and people were in line to work with him because they needed money Pg 501 He talks about the moving assembly line He wanted to break it down into 29 different steps He times the process 13 20 Then they cut it to 7 and then to 5 and by the aid of scientific study one is able to achieve the objective more efficiently It s important to have the exact speed and right height Ford also disliked the idea of best shop practices which is the idea that somewhere along the line someone said this was the best way to do something but just because it does it doesn t mean it s the best way to do it How do we know there isn t a better way if we are not willing to try it The factory keeps no record of experiments and these are important His view on experts he states that maybe fools will end up finding the best way to do something None of his men are experts A man who knows his job is always pressing forward and never gives an instance of thought about how efficient he is A whole class of professionals who sell their services to companies and these are known as consultants Film clip Modern Times When the line is moving they must always be working it s a pavlavian response Gandhi Man and Machine It focuses on mass production and addresses a number of the themes addressed in the book We ve been talking about the ethics of business When he talks about business structure he points out that the centralization is a violent system He was supportive of non violent non cooperation He got this idea from Henry David Thoreau He writes that mass production is responsible to the world crisis which was WWII He criticized it as being responsible in this German war machine because it made it possible for them to create weapons that destroyed people Mass producers produce what they want the public to buy They produce what s in their best interest for them to sell There were millions of Indians who were starving and had nothing to do they grew cotton in India He objects to the craze of machinery His concern is that this machinery leads to unequal distribution of wealth The spinning wheel became the symbol of honesty What is businesses role in the world to provide us with needs and wants and we all understand businesses must have profits in order to survive