(HT: Chief). This great '50s movie with its Rod Serling soundalike narrator cheerleading American pluck and industry gives us many modern issues to consider. Many things are still true today... or they are lost truths, unfortunately, such as the vital role of the federal government in regulating inflation and aggregate demand.
Other things are outdated and proven false; for instance, nowadays nobody thinks industry's job is robotically to "match production to consumption" via distribution and marketing, (with their focus on bigger production to lower marginal costs), and priming consumption with advertising. Today it's all about innovation and delighting customers. Marketing's primary job is to get closer to the customer and listen, perhaps start a dialogue with him, not simply beam "buy this!" messages at him.
To me, what's most poignant is the video's optimism about the future -- looking at big demographic trends, seeing big opportunities everywhere, and recognizing government's role in seizing those opportunities. We don't think that way anymore; it smacks too much of socialist central planning. But that's indeed how America used to be run: by ambitious, idealistic, unabashedly big thinkers.
The end of the film about the opportunities presented by increasing leisure time is also poignant. The film predicts: "Both trends, rising productivity and shorter hours, will continue." But with the benefit of future hindsight, we know one of those trends, shorter hours, stopped sometime in the 1970s. Meanwhile, productivity gains have continued -- U.S. workers are still the most productive in the world -- but real U.S. wages have been stagnant for about 30 years.
For those in service industries, today we have a whole new problem: too few hours. Employers and temp agencies have taken the concept of "just in time" production with machines and applied it to human laborers, who are now struggling to get enough regular work hours to take care of themselves and their families. They can forget about bygone-era benefits like paid vacation, health insurance and a company pension.
As we all know now, the marvelous cycle of U.S. mass production and consumption described in this film came crashing down some time in the 1980s when middle managers realized they could get a nice promotion and a raise by cutting costs of production by moving operations overseas, then marketing what used to be U.S.-made products back to U.S. consumers. This worked for a while... until everybody did it. Industry didn't stop to think who would buy their products when nobody had good-paying manufacturing jobs anymore. Thousands of "invisible hands" of business choked middle-income workers' wages and hence America's overall economic prosperity.
My man Chief agrees with all that, but for him the most interesting aspect of the video is that it "reflects what was then a CONSERVATIVE position!" I mean, this video was produced by "American Industry," that's what it says. You don't get any more conservative than that. Continued Chief:
Look at how far rightward the conversation has drifted from 1955 until today... For the longest time, under Alan Greenspan, there was this unbelievable dogmatism surrounding the idea of removing regulatory fetters from the market. And notice, this video doesn't talk at all about growth in the financial sector (where most of the growth has been over the last quarter century). All it talks about is "industry", not stock options or the Dow.... I just find it fascinating that what amounts to Republican, pro-business propaganda in 1955, is left of center in today's economic conversation.
Indeed the good ole' days keep changing, depending on who's doing the reminiscing.
Courtesy of the Prelinger Archive
