Leland Hazard Quotes
Adam Smith did not foresee powerful labor unions or social welfare or heavy technology. He marveled at the productivity attained by division of labor in the making of pins. He knew nothing about single electric-current circuit breakers big as a house. Although accumulation of capital from profit and its reinvestment in productive equipment were cornerstones of his philosophy, the scale of investment required for the subsequent technological advances was beyond his ken. Amusingly, he saw no future for the corporation, because, in his opinion, such an artificial body could not marshal the selfish, driving search for profit so fundamental to his system.
Leland Hazard, 1893-980, Attorney & Industrialist, “Are Big Businessmen Crooks?”, The Atlantic Monthly, November 1961
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Wilson appears to be the first to use the "bang for the buck" phrase. In this original use, it was less of a metaphor than it usually in as it described atomic testing.
Statements like this caused some to believe him a Marxist, but see his quotation on Karl Marx -- {603061}.
At the time very few industrialists appreciated the value of particular workers and tended to think of them as interchangeable parts.
The left has always been ambivalent about automation. Many object to it on the grounds that it puts men out of work. However, others such as Lafage, argued that automation was the only economic way to reform the working hours and conditions of labor. The problem at the time was that as long as labor was so cheap, there was no motivation for the manufacturer to invest in better machinery. He and many others argued that minimum wages and their increases increase productivity because it would force manufacturers to invest in more productive equipment to reduce their labor costs.
Niles, a Southern editor was none the less anti-slavery. Other than the gross immorality of slavery, he saw that the economics of the institution actually inhibited the economic development of the South very early. Efficiency of machinery and organization of work and labor saving inventions were not as badly needed in a slave economy where human labor was so inexpensive. While in the North and most of Europe, there was skilled, but expensive, labor of freemen. This motivated all to improve processes and technology and increase productivity. There was much less motivation in the South and the slaves who actually understood the work had no way to experiment and were not allowed to read or write so the South was almost economically and technologically stagnant in comparison to the free labor states.
This is a classic illustration of a quotation illustrating the problem that political discussions have with the issue of causality. Conrad is absolutely correct in stating that investment and innovation as the direct cause for most productivity. However, without the demand created by consumption (or the prospect of it) there will be little capital and effort at innovation. There is a causal chain and different ideological proponents argue for their preferred link in the chain tending to ignore the other links. Many liberals tout increasing consumption and pay little attention to the investment and innovation—an error of the opposite of Conrad’s.
This is why the American Government has played such a major role in most of the great technologies in American History. Interchangable Parts (A federal contract with Eli Whitney), Canal Construction (New York State built the Erie Canal), the Railroad (federal government gave hugh tracts of land to build the rail lines to the West), the Telegraph (No one would use it until the government financed the experiment to prove it by creating a line between Baltimore and Washington), AC Electricity, there the city of Rochester NY hired Tessler and Westinghouse to Demonstrate Generating Electricity at Niagra Falls and transmitting it over 20 miles which Edison’s Direct Current could not do), immunization (the Army Medical Corps gave the first grants to universities to develop the science of vaccines and immunization, the computer (in WWII the U. S. financed the development of computers sent to England to implement Turing’s breaking of the German “unbreakable” code), atiomic energy (the Manhattan Project—the largest scientific endeavor the world has known), the Internet (Developed with long term research funds for DARPA the future technology research arm of the Defense Department. American investors and businesspeople took each of these and developed them but the initial steps, when no capitalist dared risk on such basic and futureistic efforts were taken by American Government which probably could never have developed these technologies but the private sector could not do it with government in the role Moritz herein describes.
