1. What are the characteristics of "Made in America"?

First of all, due to the shortage of capital, it is difficult for the United States to focus on long-term durability in fixed capital investment, but to pursue short-term effects and accelerate depreciation. H.J. Habakkuk once pointed out that a Rhode Island textile mill was built in 18 13, and was completely demolished and rebuilt in 1827. Textile mills in Britain are rarely demolished and rebuilt until they go bankrupt. The U.S. Treasury Secretary reported in 1832 that the top floors and outhouses of most textile mills are full of dismantled old machines. Tocqueville also mentioned that Americans don't think their steamboats will last long because they don't have enough capital when building ships. Edward Watkin, a British railway builder, wrote after 185 1 visit to the United States: "The cost of American railways has been reduced because a little capital has to build a long way. This has lost many elements of the long-term durability of our railway. " The ironmaking industry is also a typical example. Americans raise the steam pressure to 9 pounds per square inch in order to make the iron smelting furnace produce more iron quickly, while the steam pressure of the iron smelting furnace in Britain is only 5 pounds per square inch. This "hard" ironmaking method has increased the output by 50%, but the service life of the ironmaking furnace has decreased by 80%. When the British criticized this practice, the American ironmakers replied: For their blast furnaces, "time is short and life is happy". This is not only American humor, but also a true portrayal of American industrial characteristics at that time.

Secondly, in the United States, a country with a shortage of funds and high interest rates, people always want to minimize the annual interest cost of products in stock or still in production. In other words, in order to reduce the time from raw materials to processing until the products reach the final consumers, standardized mass production later became one of the ways to achieve this goal. Alfred D. Chandler, an authoritative scholar of enterprise history, emphasized the speed of so-called "throughput" when discussing the mass production of modern large enterprises that rose in the late19th century. In his view, the management revolution characterized by the organization and coordination of hierarchical managers is an important guarantee for realizing this large-scale and high-speed production. At the turn of the century, Foley Derek Taylor's scientific management is also aimed at speeding up production, but instead of making a fuss about enterprise organization, he studies the actions and time required for workers' production, so as to maximize the use of workers' physical fitness. Not surprisingly, Taylor's scientific management has a much greater influence in the United States than in Britain.

Third, Americans are very careful in capital investment and production time, but they can "waste" raw materials in order to improve production speed. Because the most dominant factor of production in the United States is natural resources, which Britain and many other countries cannot compare with the United States. The circular saw used in the wood manufacturing industry in the United States is very fast, but because of the thick saw blade and large pitch, a large amount of wood becomes sawdust, which is intolerable in Britain. 19 an Englishman who visited the United States in the early 1970 s once commented: "Wood manufacturing in the United States is characterized by waste from wood to finished products. This kind of waste can be said to be a crime. " Therefore, as Alexander James Field pointed out, the concept of nature protection put forward by theodore roosevelt at the end of 19 was really a new concept for Americans at that time.