Thomas Friedman Quotes
You take one bomber and deploy him in Baghdad, and another is manufactured in Riyadh the next day. It's exactly like when you take the toy off the shelf at Wal-Mart and another is made in Shen Zhen the next day.
Friedman, Thomas L. The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.
The Factory had been established by the State of Virginia in 1775 to make guns. America filled with armed Americans in the Colonial era was a myth. Early America was not a gun culture. Guns were expensive, needed maintenance, took too long to reload, and were not as effective for most purposes as other weapons like hatchets and knives. American Colonial war was mostly hand to hand combat with relatively little shooting. Less than one fourth of the men joining Washington’s army owned guns. Gun factories could not survive for want of customers and gunsmiths went into other occupations. See {613052}. With the rebellion, it was critical to manufacture guns to arm the soldiers who had not their own. But the efforts like this were relatively feeble. The factory director who made not a single gun in over a year was then promoted to Commissary General of Munitions in the Continental Army. He was married to George Washington’s sister. He did however finance much of the munitions he procured with his own personal funds so made up in wealth and patriotism what he lacked in manufacturing skill.
He was right about what the Japanese made at the time. But they had an amazingly pragmatic solution for this problem. They simply changed all their product decision making to make the things that Americans did want. As a result they completely negated Dulles's prediction about the American Market and within a few years were exporting more manufactured goods to American than any other country.
This is one of the earliest, if not the earliest, statement of the undesirability of protectionism and subsidies.
Lev Davidovich Bronstein. Before the Russian Revolution large factories did not have to be very efficient as the labor was paid so little. After the Revolution, the workers were paid more and the inefficient procedures became even more disorganized with the workers in control for the first time without any management experience. At the same time, the small privately owned manufacturing businesses were making a profit with no help from the government. This was an embarrassment that the Communists eventually solved by shutting down the private businesses that were such an embarrassment. Russian manufacturing was never world class and efficient under the Soviets even after the post Revolution crises.
This historical quotation shows the extremely rapid pace that the world adopted a technology once it had been mechanized—in this case: steel.
In WWII as later, defense contractors and military weapons designers were always trying to improve the design and proto-models, thus stalling production and utilization. Arnold’s statement galvanized the program and B-29s reached the Pacific theater to help win the war.
The second sentence was used by demonstrators in a parents protest in Raleigh, NC shortly thereafter.
Ford’s associate Henry Sorenson also was deeply involved with developing the concept of an assembly line. History has tended to give the credit to Ford as he was the boss. However, it is doubtful that either man thought of the concept independently by mutually and collegially developed and implemented the idea.
Thomas Loren Friedman is an American political commentator and author. He is a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner who is a weekly columnist for The New York Times. He has written extensively on foreign affairs, global trade, the Middle East, globalization, and environmental issues.
