"No inventions; no innovations" A History of US Steel
construction-physics.com
construction-physics.com
Maybe this would also be an effective way of clearing out NIMBYs blocking the routes for high-speed rail lines?
Plenty of places are bombed into oblivion. What makes the rebirth is the rebuilding. The marshalling of public resources. You can replicate that without the bombs with a public-spending initiative.
Bombs would solve that, but come with a host of other... issues.
Beyond just the “whose money is buying?” is that the latter costs you current production while the bombed-out scenario has no current production to forego.
Indeed, something like a Marshall Plan!
> You can replicate that without the bombs with a public-spending initiative.
You can, but the challenge isn't in the implementation as much as gathering the political will to do that. Since the New Deal and WWII, that has rarely happened in the US, and only recently: The ACA, the 2021 Infrastructure Bill and the Inflation Reduction Act. All of those barely had enough support to pass and both are at risk if there is a significant shift in power.
Sometimes getting rid of ossified organizations is a good thing, but there are probably better ways than high explosives.
We brought in many new ideas - both in business and in government - most of which persist in some form today - and the Japanese in many cases have taken those ideas, refined them mightily, infused them with some Japanese culture - and re-exported them to us.
The best example of this that I can think of, is Kaizen - the various scientific management techniques exported to Japan by W. Edwards Deming - which was re-exported to us as Kaizen.
The Marshall Plan was one of the best foreign policy ideas ever so.
0: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a8/1869_Bla...
Somehow they didn't result in exchanging grids for winding streets.
The back bay, though, is newer than other parts of the city and it's a grid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Party_(1968_film)#Racial_c...
As always it starts with the uniquely explicitly race-based slavery, and from there you can draw a direct line to non-white people being systemically "othered" and denied basic human decency one way or another (to put it mildly).
In this particular case, the history of Hollywood to deny non-white actors leading roles, but giving white actors roles where they play racist stereotypes of everyone else. Aside from the issues on an individual level that also means "non-white" cultures don't get properly represented, but depicted according to whatever racist stereotype the white actors/writers have about a culture they usually don't actually know much about.
So yeah, I am not from the US but I get it. Which again makes the fact that Peter Sellers' apparently hit a positive chord an interesting exception.
Well sure. Most cultural quirks make sense in the context of that culture's history. All part of the rich tapestry of life, as long as they don't try to impose them on other cultures.
> Which again makes the fact that Peter Sellers' apparently hit a positive chord an interesting exception.
GP was saying it was unpopular with their American-born relations, no?
True
"If a small country declared war on us, we could easily bomb them back into the iron age."
Putin probably thought the same about Ukraine.
Military objectives were achieved in Afghanistan, but not in Korea and Vietnam. And based on Clausewitz: "War is politics by other means" And our politics changed....
> Putin probably thought the same about Ukraine.
I doubt, as Ukraine is far from being a small country. It is the second largest European country (counting Russia as an European country, as is common in geography). (he most likely had other miscalculations leading to the current situation)
Hard disagree on Korea. South Korea is a hell of an ally, very inconvenient for the PRC.
The objective of the US once they pushed back the initial invasion in the Korean War was to destroy the DPRK, force communism out of Korea, and unify the country. They failed. The war became a stalemate once China got directly involved.
If Vietnam becomes a stalwart ally of the US over the next 20 years that won’t mean the Vietnam War was a success just because the US ended up eventually having a useful interest in the region.
The objective of the war was to prevent the spread of communism. That goal was achieved.
With all the post-WW2 wars, we've gone in as a dominant power, as the aggressor, to a country that is far smaller and less developed. In terms of casualties, they've been even more lopsided victories than WW2. The second Iraq war killed about half a million Iraqis and displaced about 1.8M, vs. < 1000 Americans killed, for a kill ratio of ~500:1. But what does it even mean to achieve victory here? We go in as a bully and ruin our world reputation. The average American sees zero benefit from killing Iraqis; it just means higher oil prices, larger government debt, more inflation, reduced civil liberties, and a lack of focus on domestic problems (...which may be the point). Defense contractors make out like a bandit, and the executive branch gets to consolidate power (...which, again, may be the point), but there isn't room to grow the way there was after WW2.
I think eventual loss in Ukraine will be last nail in the coffin of US military reputation.
Same way that russia is not fighting a war but commencing special military operation.
US is doing it with both hands tied behind their back but it will make defeat no less devastating.
In reality US is fighting their penultimate war right now if it ends in a loss.
> what was considered to be the 2nd or 3rd strongest army on the planet..
That was summarily debunked about two weeks into the conflict. And noone but russians believes it today.
Where'd those Bradleys come from, then? Zero troops yes, but the US has absolutely shipped a ton of military hardware to Ukraine.
Ukraine would absolutely fold without the inflow of NATO military hardware, that's the crux of Russia's strategy for winning - hope it can undermine Western support for a Ukraine war, and then crush Ukraine once they're on their own. That's the entire reason why Russia blocked gas exports to Europe - they lost a lot of gas profits forcing the EU to choose between supporting Ukraine or having Russian gas for the winter.
The US itself isn't fighting in the war, but they're undeniably a key participant in it. With military hardware and training and intel support and money.
And yes, those details matter in geopolitics, a lot.
I'll grant that for the Bradley, but Patriot batteries are in rather short supply.
US is simply not a party to Ukraine’s war; they are supplying equipment in a very minimal capacity.
Russia started it. US didn't run away soon and fast enough. Now the fight is on. If it ends with Russia winning nobody will listen to US whining "but we didn't really fight". Nobody will care. Neither opponents, nor allies. Especially not China.
This might be taught in US schools, but outside the US we have a rather different take on how the Vietnam war ended - the US-backed government fell and the North Vietnamese government took over the rest of the country. And we learned that the Korean war ended in some kind of stalemate, where the government structures on both sides exist largely intact today.
“If they would waste all that blood and treasure for a small country in east Asia, imagine what they would do if tanks rolled into Moscow?!”
The cultural part can't be understated. By the 1960's young men world wide would rather be a rock star banging groupies than fight for the revolution. There is a reason the Khmer Rouge killed the pop stars in Cambodia.
Notable Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Germany became wealthy by aligning closely to the US. Where commies and non aligned became poorer.
Least impressive was the CIA's skullduggery and Kissinger's Real Politic.
I'm arguing that this is the wrong litmus test for judging the winners of war, because war is an ineffective way of achieving regime change in the first place. Even in cases where it looks like a country "wins" a war by "defeating" their opponents, they usually collapse from the inside and then the true winners are those that either take advantage of the chaos to seize power, or stay out of the war entirely. The allies were victorious in WW1 - yet the government they wanted stayed in power for barely 10 years, and then we got Hitler and WW2. Russia was part of the victorious allies in WW1, but the country collapsed and the communists took over. The communists were the official victors of the Vietnam war, but Vietnam is now one of the most capitalist countries on earth, and so politically they were defeated by economics and not war.
Also, the Korean war was clearly a victory for the US; we intended to defend SK and prevent the spread of Communism, and that’s what happened.
Nonsense. A clear victory would be if South Korea held its frontline near the Chinese border, instead of being pushed back to the 38th parallel.
The Korean war was a stalemate. It wasn't a loss, but it wasn't a win.
I'm also not aware of the existing Vietnamese government falling (depends on which one you consider the existing one but it was not the government the U.S. wanted to fall that fell). The country resisted a superior invader like it did in the past (China) and I'm pretty sure most people would consider Vietnam the winner of the war (if there's a winner in war).
North Vietnam conquered South Vietnam after we withdrew. It was in no way a victory for the United States. Afghanistan was arguably pretty similar, although we did install a new government while we were there.
Germany and Japan, on the other hand, surrendered unconditionally. Saying that Germany and Japan were “bombed back into the Stone Age” is a wild exaggeration, though — strategic bombing famously failed to cripple Germany’s wartime industrial production. (Strategic bombing in general is overrated.)
Your number for US deaths in Iraq is low by at least a factor of four.
You may wish to learn the actual histories of these wars before trying to draw big conclusions.
Vietnam ended in US defeat, and French defeat before that.
Afghanistan ended with US / NATO defeat and the Taliban taking over the country.
The Korean War isn't over yet technically, all we have there is a cease fire. Stalemate, nobody surrendered.
The US won the second Gulf War, Panama and some smaller stuff I am too lazy to look up.
The “clear and internationally acknowledged” criteria for a 'loss' is being caught on camera while the last soldiers evacuate and the enemy takes over.
So technically Vietnam and Afghanistan are losses. Because of the video's.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_conflict
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/12/30/asia...
edit: to be clear, you don't dispute that the taliban has retaken the country from US forces right?
They’re inherently different and the only way to “””win”””(which is a loaded term with wars against insurgents. We accomplished important strategic goals in Vietnam before leaving the country to self determine) is to resort to tactics employed by folks like The Butcher did in Cuba.
The US won zero strategic goals, Vietnam was reunited by force under the communist North. The US goal was to orevent exactly that. Nice spin so, calling Vietnam a defacto strategic victory for the US.
And Afghanistan, seriously? Before, anti-Talobam forces controlled at least parts of zue country. Nowy the Taliban are in full controll after they over ran Kabul following a hasty retreat of NATO forces from the country, that is as clear cut a loss as it gets. Had the US led coalition left after Bin-Laden was killed, one could have declared a victory. By staying and tuening the whole affaire into a foreign occupation without clearly defined goals, the US-led coalition could only loose. And they did.
That’s completely false. A large strategic goal of USA in Vietnam was to show strategic partners and allies the extent to which USA was willing to go for its commitments.
> And Afghanistan, seriously?
I have no idea what you’re asking. Vietnam and Afghanistan were simply not real wars in the traditional “win-loss” sense for USA; Afghanistan moreso than Vietnam.
The government of North & South Vietnam that I'm speaking of was France.
Acknowledged on the undercount of U.S. casualties in Iraq. It doesn't change my conclusion, though.
There's a sibling comment by delecti that's making the point that I'm driving at: what is the goal of war? Is it regime change? Is it to sell arms? Is it to kill people? If it's regime change, war in general is a remarkably ineffective way of doing that - it's pretty rare that the victorious powers get the government they actually want, otherwise we would never have had to fight WW2. If it's killing people or feeding the military-industrial complex, the U.S. was pretty good at that in all the wars listed.
Incidentally, Vietnam is currently one of the most capitalist countries on Earth. So politically, the communists were defeated. All we had to do was let them govern the country for 15 years and everybody realized they didn't want communism.
> The U.S. "won" Korea, Iraq, Vietnam, and Afghanistan in the same sense that they "won" WW2 - those countries were bombed back into the stone age and the existing governments fell.
Now you are saying:
> The government of North & South Korea that I'm speaking of was Japan.
> The government of North & South Vietnam that I'm speaking of was France.
Which completely contradicts what you said before, and is even more wrong.
Japan was firebombed pretty ruthlessly. McNamara openly stated that he would have been tried as a war criminal had the US lost the war. Here is a list of 67 Japanese cities that were firebombed with their destruction % and their US size equivalent:
http://www.ditext.com/japan/napalm.html#google_vignette
Source: The Fog of War (Documentary)
I guess this all depends on one’s definition “bombed back into the Stone Age”. I’m sure descendants of those that lived in Dresden might argue that they, in fact, were indiscriminately bombed to the point of ruin.
Guess technically, 'stone age' is hyperbole. They didn't literally have to climb back up through a bronze age and steal age again.
But point stands, they were severely crippled.
Well, yeah. And it's not exactly a technical term. Don't get me wrong, the strategic bombing was very destructive and killed a lot of people. The way I interpret the phrase is that bombing a country "back to the stone age" means destroying their industrial production. And strategic bombing didn't do that. Germany and Japan's GDPs did not crater; their production of military hardware increased through 1944. I'm sure the bombing kept it from increasing more, but that's not what the phrase implies. When the Allied armies entered Germany in 1944 their opponents were armed with guns and tanks, not bows and spears.
Also note. There were 4x as many deaths from suicide. If we really cared about soldiers, this would be the number one story every day.
https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/military/kil...
Over 7,000 U.S. service members and over 8,000 contractors have died in the post-9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.
Over 30,177 U.S. service members and veterans of the post-9/11 wars have died by suicide. Coalition partners have died in large numbers: approximately 177,000 uniformed Afghans, Pakistanis, Iraqis, and Syrian allies have died as of November 2019.
Do you think that wars are not political? A political win is a military win.
Korea was a proxy war between the US and China (i.e. Communism). The US wanted a foothold on the mainland and to put a demonstration of the virtues of Capitalist Economics in the Communists' back yard, both of which it got in the form of South Korea. If the US hadn't been involved, "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" (i.e. North Korea) would have rolled south with China's backing and "Korea" would have been a single communist country.
Without China's involvement the opposite would have happened. China was well aware of this and did not want a capitalist economy sharing a border with it -- Berlin Wall kind of problems -- so they weren't going to stop supporting North Korea.
Which is the kind of situation that makes unconditional military victory close to impossible. China just keeps giving North Korea assistance, most of the casualties are North Koreans rather than Chinese and the North Korean leadership won't surrender as long as they have China's backing because it's not a democracy so staying in power is the only thing their leaders care about. "Unconditional victory" would effectively have to be a military victory over China.
At the time the US had nuclear weapons and China didn't, but China had half a billion in population even then, and they too were a non-democracy whose leaders cared more about staying in power than dead citizens. The US could have won militarily if they were willing to kill several hundred million people. It's probably best that they weren't.
And it was largely the same for the other proxy wars. Unconditional victory would require victory over not just the nominal enemy but the ones propping them up. Hence Cold War.
Could they really? Would the nuclear-armed Soviet Union idly stand by and watch US commit nuclear holocaust against it's close neighbour? They wouldn't. Would US allies back them in a war that turned into genocide? Unlikely.
So no, they probably could not have done that because they would not risk escalation into WW3 where most allies abandon USA.
I feel you're overlooking the critical fact that after the allies won WW2, Nazis didn't control Germany.
Whereas the Taliban remains in control of Afghanistan. To describe that as a US win doesn't really seem accurate.
The US did print a big 'Mission Accomplished' banner though, so I agree the folks who started the war do claim it was a victory.
Of course, Iraq also had no WMDs before the war, so I'm not sure the episode proves much about America's ability to win.
"winning" the war means accomplishing your political objectives. Those objectives may change as the war goes on, and in the case of Korea, the objective became "keep South Korea free from North Korean domination." That was achieved.
It was unclear to MacArthur and he assumed it was "destroy North Korea, whatever it takes." That became NOT the US objective, when it became clear that China stood in the way of it.
In Vietnam the objectives were never clearly laid out, but "keep South Vietnam free from North Vietnam domination" was pretty clearly it. Thus, we lost.
Your other points are wrong: the first Iraq war's objective was to eject Iraq from Kuwait. Perhaps that goal was insufficient, but that was the goal the military undertook, and achieved.
https://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Critical-Analysis-Vietnam-Wa...
The US isn't conventionally, even in the US. viewed as the victor in Korea (war is still in progress, with a long but imperfectly observed ceasefire), Vietnam (one of the few wars the US generally acknowledges as an unambiguous defeat, thought right wingers will often say that we won “militarily” and lost “politically” or some other cope), or Afghanistan (recently added to the list alongside Vietnam).
Also, the prewar opposing in Korea, Vietnam. Iraq (1991), and Afghanistan did not fall, and in each case remained in power after the war (and in Vietnam and Afghanistan, the primary opposing government ended up in control of more territory as a result of the war, controlling undivided a country which it had controlled only a divided—formally in Vietnam’s case, de facto for the Taliban in Afghanistan—fraction of before the war.)
> With all the post-WW2 wars, we've gone in as a dominant power, as the aggressor
No, we haven't. Not even in a loose sense of “aggressor” in several of them.
If you go by deaths, USA did very well in Vietnam. However, with wars of insurgency people like The Butcher showed that far more deaths are required to win than is palatable
I was going to respond to each of your points carefully, but since you mentioned that Iraq’s leadership remained in power after 1991 as some kind of rebuttal, I am not certain I should. Indeed, overthrowing Iraq’s government was not a war aim there.
Yes, if war was a game where the victory condition was killing the most people... well, actually, the Khmer Rouge would have won the wars in the region, by a wide margin.
But its not, so “yeah but we killed more people than our immediate enemy” is... irrelevant, mostly. Killing people is a means, not an ends, in war (I mean, except when your war aim is extermination, but that's not the general case.)
> but since you mentioned that Iraq’s leadership remained in power after 1991 as some kind of rebuttal, I am not certain I should. Indeed, overthrowing Iraq’s government was not a war aim there.
I’m not the one that said a unifying feature of the post-WW2 wars was that the US destroyed the pre-existing government and thereby won, when that is very much nor a characteristic of those wars in general, or the specific cited examples originally provided (leaving off Iraq I, it wasn't a feature of Korea, Vietnam, or Afghanistan, specifically cited as examples upthread, either.)
I would call the first Iraq war a success - the US achieved it's aims of driving Iraq out of Kuwait, destruction of the Iraq military, a UN resolution approving the attack, and wide support.
Contrast this to the second Iraq war and Afghanistan, where I agree the US was perceived as a bully. It bullied Pakistan ("You're with us or against us", war threats) into supporting the invasion of Afghanistan, and the invasion of Iraq was illegal, with France prepared to veto any UN resolution trying to legitimize the war.
Bingo! There would be no Taliban if USA made Afghanistan an unincorporated territory like Puerto Rico, handed out passports and rebuilt infrastructure / governance.
There was a plan for what to bomb, but no plan for what to build. Basically a huge waste of time.
It's an excellent movie though.
(actually, it looks like it is five years older than Dr. Strangelove? This looks like it could be turned into a very mean pubquiz trivia question, hahaha)
Europe deciding to light itself on fire twice in the last century is the best thing that ever happened to America.
It's not uncommon for a country to get stuck in a situation where they have no infrastructure that could attract investment so they have no industry so they have no economic base to build infrastructure. "Get the US to loan us money" is nominally a way out of this.
The US noticed this too and makes loans to such countries de facto through the World Bank, providing them with an opening through which they can crawl up inside those countries and lay eggs.
Edit: also the effect of Marshallplan is usually vastly overstated - due to the massive bureaucracy involved it had relatively little impact.
Your point is mostly irrelevant. US steel could have innovated or even copied - but it didn't.
The idea that poor US steel couldn't compete because other startups had an advantage is assinine. That is a core message of the article itself.
You forgot that US took every German and Japanese engineer as prisoner. As a friend said, US chemical industry worked 40 years after the WWII with German patents.
This is not even slightly true.
Do you mean took them prisoner for a few days to sort out paperwork, or do you mean took them prisoner and kept them?
The latter is provably nonsense as indicated by e.g. Heckler and Koch, a German engineering company (and later gun company) formed by three former Mauser engineers. Mauser, the gun company.
never change hn
Once those matured, the new stuff quickly caught up. But it needed time.
What makes you think it was the increase in executive or shareholder comp that caused the degradation in quality? Do we even know if there was a degradation between a 1960 ford and 1985, or is it because the Japanese and German automakers raised our standards?
This is a situation where a lot of narratives fit the evidence.
The cost difference is small but it's indicative of a larger issue of disposability. One of the reasons Japanese vehicles started to dominate was that they lasted longer. This is due to better tolerances, more efficient engines, and more robust component design.
The Toyota production method, lean and just-in-time were mostly methods for rationalizing better systems to eliminate waste within production and to minimize inventory. Such methods don't inherently make a better car though they leave more io the table to spend on coatings, quality parts etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming
The wiki has this line that sums it all up perfectly:
In 1982, Deming's book Quality, Productivity, and Competitive Position was published by the MIT Center for Advanced Engineering, and was renamed Out of the Crisis in 1986. In it, he offers a theory of management based on his famous 14 Points for Management. Management's failure to plan for the future brings about loss of market, which brings about loss of jobs. Management must be judged not only by the quarterly dividend, but also by innovative plans to stay in business, protect investment, ensure future dividends, and provide more jobs through improved products and services. "Long-term commitment to new learning and new philosophy is required of any management that seeks transformation. The timid and the fainthearted, and the people that expect quick results, are doomed to disappointment."
I refer you to the movie Roger & Me.
I know because I've driven cars from both eras. GM and Ford cars from the late 50s required a lot of maintenance by modern standards and they guzzled gas and they would kill you if you had a crash in one. But they were built like battle tanks: Lots of steel; very little plastic.
By the end of the 1970s, US cars were built mostly out of plastic. The issue was not that they required more maintenance. The issue was that they fell to pieces on the highway. If you left one sitting in the sun for a year, it would turn into dust. They were utter, unrepairable crap.
They didn't just forget. They rejected approaches that would have helped them improve quality.
Deming tried to convince US industry for quality, but was rejected. He, however, was embraced in Japan.
Really the thing that does this is market concentration. You have only three major companies in an industry and they can play "conscious parallelism" games to avoid competing with each other while pointing to the others as ostensible competition to fend off antitrust allegations.
Then because they're not actually subject to competitive pressure, they stagnate, and as soon as anyone else shows up who hasn't forgotten how to satisfy the customer, the incumbents start to crumble.
It isn't a coincidence that the article is about something similar happening to US Steel, the infamous former monopolist.
Double-huh, almost every market I see is a cartel or monopoly.
Hm, the conservatives never talk about free markets anymore.
I'm sure it's a coincidence.
I'm saddened by the fact that this retelling seems mostly negative and ignores a large part of US Steel's evolution into USX. The retelling is subtractive whether you view Marathon Oil's involvement as a positive complementary asset play at the time or a negative given the history of its divestiture.
I can say that there was innovation in the data center where I worked in the evolution from manual human mainframe era data center operations to token ring networks of PC API's along with abstraction and automation via glue code.
The minimization of manual human labor as people retired is likely lost to the history books unless one of my old technical collaborators decides to write a book in retirement.
The CMU kids I worked with at US Steel's data center in Pittsburgh were just as smart as the ones I worked with in the software industry from Boston to Seattle.
Did it tend to be strategic or tactical?
How closely was tied to their core competencies?
How many innovations were industry firsts?
What percent impact did they have on profits / growth / market share?
From the article it sounds like innovation and investment were consistently blocked by short term financial goals.
I can easily believe there were lots of very smart people, with transformative ideas, that were never given a chance to thrive.
There was plenty of innovation clear to anyone with the proximity and education to recognize it, but your questions raise intractable issues of the proprietary information of any large corporation.
From my naive college kid's vantage point, the majority of innovation was tactical and not tied to core competencies owing to the siloed nature of communication between management and technical layers; i.e. it's difficult, if not impossible, for innovation to pass through that gated silo without a catalyst to nurture and support its transformation from tactical to strategic. This is a fundamental problem of complementary assets and the need for interdisciplinary culture that accrues to their composition, complexity, and collaborative community.
We could certainly debate whether this is the crux of "The Corporation" over the last twenty years of acquisitions seemingly aimed at silencing competition.
Of the two companies I worked with in that time period thirty years ago, both of their nail-in-the-coffin, final acquisitions approached $20 billion. Innovation has a way of disappearing in the dark subtext of large corporate acquisitions.
The "never given a chance to thrive" is insightful beyond US Steel. That is, well into modern tech startups that are managed by the same kinds of people who managed GM in the 1970's.
“Arguably, the Harvard system was a disappointment every day since 1636…”
It's not clear to me whether you meant "pivot" or "pilot" but the downstream effect is likely the same. Trying to account for divestitures and acquisitions in such a large corporation is a fool's gold of forensic accounting. Just because the business wasn't more transparent than their incorporation required doesn't mean that they weren't thinking broadly and deeply about the future of their core business.
The amount of steel in use per capita in developed countries seems to have reached a constant level. About 69% of steel produced in the US is the same steel going round and round. If you ignore rebar, low-grade steel stuck inside concrete, it's even higher. It's the developing countries that are still making and using new steel. They don't have enough steel infrastructure yet.
"Mini-mill", in this context, means "smaller than a square mile". Here's Nucor's Crawfordsville plant.[1] It's not small. Compare with US Steel's Gary Works.[2] That century old plant is just about their last remaining big plant in the US.
US Steel somehow missed this change.
[1] https://earth.google.com/web/@39.97805108,-86.8271336,264.41...
[2] https://earth.google.com/web/@41.62932676,-87.36187513,174.7...
The chapter describing the accident (where a ladle of molten steel fell and the steel drained into a depressed area with standing water) is horrific. It's fortunate the body count wasn't higher.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnitogorsk
"In 1928 a Soviet delegation arrived in Cleveland, Ohio, to discuss with American consulting company Arthur G. McKee a plan to set up in Magnitogorsk a copy of the US Steel steel-mill in Gary."
It seems crazy to me that any first world nation would let it's steel production fall into foreign hands. As a machinist for 5 years in my country I would have been excempt from military service even in total war.
If US steel is unable to innovate and foreign ownership is somehow not a problem, this development is probably a good thing. The Zaibatsu system is a good fit for what steel is.
On the materials side. Totally agree. However the issue there, is that's not what corporations tend to optimize. The story itself really spells it out pretty clearly (it may be biased, never worked at US Steel personally). However, the article's description is:
US Steel became a monopoly, and immediately acted like a monopoly. Innovation ceased. Money extraction began. Commanding obedience was the norm. Convincing themselves all competitors would fail was the norm. And US Steel did not want to invest in anything outside its own sunk costs.
it's kind of funny because the US won WWII by the ability to churn out huge volumes of decent quality goods but now our military seems to be adopting the German idea that small numbers of expensive wunderwaffen will turn the tide
They're moving away from that - they're becoming more similar to the US in prioritizing quality. China is racing to build a first-world economy before their demographics shut down their growth, so relying on cheap, plentiful troops makes less and less sense as the years go on.
We're never going to fight WW2 again, because all the great powers have nuclear weapons now. The US army will never take the field in a straight up slugfest against Russia or China.
So that leaves non-nuclear regional powers. But you simply don't need a whole-of-society mobilization to fight Iran. The phase of active combat against Iran will not take years-- it won't take months.
If we really needed to, we could be building millions of Jeeps again. But we don't need to, and won't need to.
For perusal in the many ways humans have found to deploy nukes other than ICBMs. Note: SAMs, Artillery, RPGs, Mines, and Torpedoes. [1] Yields stretching from 0.02 KT at 50 kg [2] weight to 50,000 KT at 27,000 kg. [3][4] Sure, the high end stuff is world ending, yet the low end stuff is war enabling. And there's enough ways to knock missiles out of the air. Wargames computers are still calculating.
Note the propensity of the wealthy to build bunker houses. Feel like they know something I don't know.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_weapons
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_(nuclear_device)
And they tried more complicated alloys, for instance they developed Corten steel, the biggest example of which is probably the US Steel building in Pittsburgh, [1]. It's a steel where it's 'rust' essentially works as a protective layer.
More than anything this article shows US Steel simply couldn't compete with foreign suppliers. It's interesting to me that they don't even mention the Steel Workers Union, which was/is one of the largest and most powerful unions in the U.S. I'm not saying the cause, but if you need 5% more steel to cover the deficiencies in foreign steel in strength, but it's 20% cheaper, than it's simply cheaper to import more foreign steel.
Also worthy of mention is the New River Gorge Bridge. [1]
And the recently-collapsed Fern Hollow Bridge in Pittsburgh. [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_River_Gorge_Bridge
[2] https://www.carboline.com/solution-spot/posts/pittsburgh-bri...
Because the only inovation came from stolen patents from eastern europe.
You can survive doing nothing until your competitor comes with something new.
It did not go well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backyard_furnace
When things go pear shaped do not be found holding the bag. If later questioned: "it was all great when I was there, it's so sad that it went south - it was a great place and there was a lot of value on the table."
Strangely the big investors don't seem to ever cotton on to this - the big pension funds and sovereign wealth seem to respond by getting out of the equity markets and investing in things like property.
Any successful company has to do both.
It's not the innovators dilemma, it's the c-suite lines their pockets while the company burns dilemma.
This problem can be somewhat ameliorated by compensating executives primarily using equity with long vesting or lock-up periods. That keeps their interests aligned with long-term shareholders.
> citizens realize they can vote themselves money
Although this certainly sounds true if you consider just the richest citizens and by "vote" you mean inflence the votes.
It fits the economy surprisingly well. Harvard, arguably a bank not a school. US Steel, joke is they produce money not steel. Airlines are trying to avoid flying airplanes, and operate air miles banks. Hasbro no longer produces toys, only money. Article today where the main commentary on Intel was the finance bros took over a long time ago.
I expect aluminum to displace more steel in the future. Witness what's happening with "gigacasting" at Tesla and elsewhere.
Substituting aluminum for copper (in wires, for example) may end up making steel more recyclable. Aluminum doesn't contaminate molten steel (it's used as a deoxygenating agent when making steel, in fact), while copper does.
US Steel’s vertical integration practices changed the game and influence goes all the way to Apple and Tesla today.
Their way of standardizing manufacturing processes inspired Henry Fords assembly line.
Their Research Lab paved the way for the establishment of similar, famous labs at IBM, Bell, Xerox and others.
Their corporate structure set a precedent for large-scale corporations, influencing the development of conglomerates like GE to diversify various industries under a single corporate umbrella
"By 1958 some steelmakers in Germany and Japan were able to compete on price with US producers, and by the mid-1970s input costs for Japanese steel (ore, labor, coking coal, etc.) were nearly half those of US costs."
So the input costs were half almost certainly all due to labor either directly or indirectly.
Viewed in this light the fall of US Steel is no different than any other manufacturing process in the USA.
In Japan between 1956 and 1976 the real cost of steel fell by some 39%. Although wages increased
more than 10-fold, gains in labor productivity more than compensated, so that real unit labor costs fell
by 16.3%, accounting for about 5 of the 39% drop in real costs. The rest of the 39% was due to a decline
in unit materials and energy costs. In the US between 1956 and 1976, while the dollar depreciated by 17.8%, the real domestic cost of
producing steel grew by 37%. Although steel had historically been a materials-intensive sector, by
1956 in the US, labor and materials each accounted for about the same share of unit input costs. Each
also grew in real terms by roughly the same rate from 1956 to 1976: unit labor costs by 35% and unit
material costs by 38%. Each therefore made like contributions to a loss in US comparative advantage
in steelmaking. The main reason for the rise in unit material costs was a 48% increase of the real price of
iron ore and (with our 1976 end date falling in the aftermath of the 1973 oil price shock) a near dou-
bling of the real price of coke.It’s fascinating how so many business mistakes from the last 100 years continue to be relevant and continue to be repeated.
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.
I remember this happening in school. Plus the teacher of a class (70s) I was in blamed the Steel Problems on the Marshall Plan. Until I saw this article I believed that.
Now I know it seems to point to the usual US trend of profits before anything else.
Not sure if that happened but the stock went up quite a bit since then.
https://youtu.be/1D2Q9-1EmB4?si=gXwIO3FzpSKkp3VV
US Steel, Tom Russell