211–220 of 298 posts
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Henry Ford just wanted to be rich and said something that sounded good and inspired people to work for him. Bezos does similar things for his workers.
Didn't he pay more than his competitors and get sued by his competitors for not acting in the the best interest of his shareholders (by wanting to pay his workers even more)?
The Dodge brothers were major investors in Ford Motor Company, and thus entitled to a large share of dividends. Henry Ford tried to bankrupt the Dodge Motor Company by avoiding to pay FoMoCo dividends and thus starve his competitor of cash. The fact that the mechanism Ford used to make his own company unprofitable (and thus avoid paying dividends) also benefited the workers is just coincidence.
In fact the reason we have the modern precedent "companies must operate for the benefit of shareholders" is precisely because Henry Ford's defense in Dodge v. Ford was "I can do this because I want to and I am king". If he had argued "paying workers more makes them happier and thus makes Ford more profitable in the long term", Ford probably would have won that lawsuit. He didn't make that argument because it just wasn't on his radar: His goal was screwing Dodge.
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Not sure why Ocado gets so much credit for the latter though, they just copied AutoStore which has a fascinating history! They purchased an AutoStore, then reverse engineered it, made a few changes, and claimed it as their own invention.
There was a big patent lawsuit related to this, which as I understand it Ocado won pretty comprehensively. ( https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/ocado-wins-... -- case in UK court concluded that AutoStore's patents were all invalid and in any case Ocado didn't infringe them; there were a bunch of related cases in other jurisdictions but https://www.ocadogroup.com/media/news/autostore-and-ocado-se... indi…
Their patents were invalidated in the U.S. due to "inequitable conduct or equitable estoppel" meaning either that Autostore violated someone else's patents or that they led Ocado to believe that Ocado was not violating Autostore's patents in some way. Both parties indicate that the latter happened, but the usual remedy is just a mandatory license, so the invalidation of the patents indicates that the former also occurred. (https://www.autostoresystem.com/investors-press-releases/aut...)
Henry Ford famously wanted his workers to be able to afford his cars. When Bezos replaces everyone with robots, who will be left to buy his junk?
There will be plenty of money to be made serving the needs and interests of the wealthy, while the rest of us are serviced by an informal economy that doesn't see institutional investment. Look at street markets in countries with high wealth disparity. The well-off wouldn't shop or eat there, and they certainly wouldn't invest in a street vendor, the vendors are meant to serve the needs of people in poverty. See Citi…
Henry Ford famously wanted his workers to be able to afford his cars. When Bezos replaces everyone with robots, who will be left to buy his junk?
The point wasn't really that workers should be the primary clientele, just that the average worker should be able to afford it, and if that wasn't the case the price of the goods should be lowered, or a trend started for higher worker compensation. Robotic workers lower operational costs and can make goods more accessible, and it's common for various manual labour jobs to be lost when industries change - the labour s…
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I see this thinking thrown around often, but I don't see how net new jobs would be created by efficiencies. Amazon wouldn't adopt robots if it created more employment overhead downstream. Sure, there will be robot maintainers, but not at a replacement level of the roles replaced. Companies adopt technologies because they reduce the net amount of human input (cost) required, right?
Well, the industrial revolution has been a story of continuous efficiency gains and increasing automation, but somehow there's still enough jobs.
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Plenty of people who don’t work for Amazon already buy stuff from there. I guess I mostly see the jobs as exchanging labour for something that society values and so by automating, there is more labour available to do things society values and so society gets more of what it values. And if you think working for Amazon is bad for people then you should be happy if automation is decreasing the number of people suffering…
I think the latter view is usually held by people who know they won't experience productivity gains from automation. Say someone who is has driven a taxi all their life or driven a forklift. They can appreciate how adding air-conditioning to their vehicle allows them to drive in hotter days, therefore they can do more work. But automating their whole job away with autonomous vehicles doesn't benefit them, so they don…
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Kind of but it was moreso that he wanted to invest in expansion and R&D while driving prices down for consumers See: Dodge vs Ford
Fascinating read especially when viewed from the strategic angling to make Ford less profitable and cut off the minority shareholders the Dodge brothers from the dividend revenue stream they were using to build a rival company. So ironically, while the court held that the board had to prioritize shareholder profits, he would have realized greater shareholder profits by stifling the competition in its crib.
It's a bit more nuanced than that. The court held that company directors have to be acting for the benefit of shareholders. They still have wide latitude about how to do that.
The reason Ford lost is because his legal position was essentially "I am king, therefore I can do whatever I want". But you can't do whatever you want. You can't lock the workers in the factory and burn it down with them inside, for example. You need to have some kind of colorable argument that what you are doing is somehow in the interest of shareholders (either long or short term).
The problem for Ford was that he couldn't articulate any reason for how his actions were beneficial to shareholders (probably because the real reason, killing the Dodge Brothers Company, would have been illegal under the antitrust laws of the time).