Ben Waber reviewed America's Assembly Line by David E. Nye
An Insightful Review of the Assembly Line's Long History in the US
4 stars
Nye traces the history, refinement, and diffusion of the assembly line process through the decades, demonstrating its tremendous power in driving (see what I did there?) mass market production and consumption. The sections that covered the diffusion of the optimized process conceived at Ford through work site visits by European executives was instructive, as was the similar ingestion of more effective Japanese processes later in the century. The specter of automation taking jobs is continually raised throughout the decades, essentially never coming to pass (most displacement was due to outsourcing), which hopefully people today consider when they make proclamations about the potential displacement effects of new technologies. Highly recommend