I asked:
>> why would the people at the top of GM, etc., _deliberately_ produce
>> inferior products when there's increasing foreign competition?
Chuck Grimes wrote:
> You tell me. Capital arrogance. The people who make decisions are
> business `leaders' and they didn't know jack shit about cars.
the answer I'd have is that they had become accustomed to the "easy
life" of being protected from competition and had a hard time
adapting. In addition, in an effort to keep the UAW happy, they'd made
promises to the workers such as pensions (deferred wages) that they
thought they could afford (given the absence of international
competition so far) and then found that those promises imposed costs
on them that they had a hard time affording. (Of course, when they had
the chance, they broke those promises. They likely thought that the
promise of deferred wages was easier to break than that of current
wages.)
I think arrogance ("what's good for GM is good for the USA," and all
that) prevented them from seeing that the rise of international
competition was well-nigh inevitable. They expected to be protected.
Of course hardly anyone predicted competition's rise back during the
1950s, as far as I know.
--
Jim Devine / If you're going to support the lesser of two evils, you
should at least know the nature of that evil.
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