Alright Kaiser back in the story to build merchant freighters for British because America’s biggest shipyards were at capacity for navy orders.
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Fascinating glimpse of balancing civilian and military production. No point diverting raw materials to military if you then can’t build houses for civilians to work on it, or roads to transport material to factories. Economy is intertwingled. Military/civilian is fake divide.
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The breakdown of various attempts to partition the economic web by fiat in human meaningful terms (civilian/military, essential/non-essential, strategic/non-strategic) is like the explainable AI problem. Like declaring pi=3 like Arizona once tried to do. Might blog this.
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Picking this one back up after a while. Now into 1941. Defense spending up 12x through the year. US approaching Nazi germany in output. 1942 overtake. Capitalist exponential network effects slower to start, but faster once past a point.
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Now at Pearl Harbor... “[the army plan]... still saw Japan as a problem to be put off until at least July 1943. The timetable had suddenly, catastrophically speeds up.” Timetables speeding up is a general theme across everything I’m reading right now. “Slowly, then suddenly”
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The auto industry was like Silicon Valley of 1940-45 looks like. Knudsen weathered the 1940s techlash by simply ignoring it, refusing to defend himself, and just doing what he thought necessary. You can do that if you’re kinda indispensable.
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Though this book is obviously strongly pro-capitalism/anti new-deal crowd, the state of play still filters through. Looks like Big Labor at its height was as corrupt as Big Finance at its height today. Absolute power corrupts absolutely etc.
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New dealers get Knudsen fired from OPM. OPM and SPAB replaces by new agency WPB. War Production Board. Knudsen devastated but lands 3-star generalship on military side of effort. Only civilian to get that. Kicked... sideways?
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Rule of three: In the first year after a production order output was bound to 3x. In second year, 6x. In third year, at supply limit: materials and labor.
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Chapter on Six Companies work in construction in pacific islands, and civilian workers role in battle of wake island. Kaiser role there was supplying cement in bulk carriers instead of bags, for efficiency, assuming the risk. Now into liberty ships story https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Wake_Island …
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Summer of 1941: 4000 workers in Richmond yards. After Pearl Harbor, by end of 1942: 80,000. 20x. WW2 manufacturing tech was highly scalable with relatively low-skill/low-training labor. Kinda like driving Uber today I guess.
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Fascinating story of race between 2 Kaiser shipyards, Richmond 2 (Clay Bedford) and Portland (Edgar Kaiser) to drive production faster using prefab deck house sections and assembly line techniques. Time cut from 220 days to 10 over a couple of years. https://www.armed-guard.com/teal.html
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Bedford takes back record with Robert E Peary built in < 5 days. Something of an engineered PR stunt of course, but these record setting races did drive genuine advances in construction techniques. China is in this mode today. Like those Wuhan hospitals. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Robert_E._Peary …
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End of conversation
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