Henry Ford's Field Experiment on Institutions vs. Geography
Can we export our institutions into a LDC and help it grow? This book about Henry Ford's failed attempt to build "Fordlandia" in the Amazon suggests that the answer is no but it seems that Ford's treatment went only half-way.
"Ford’s Amazon team had plenty of able men, but as Grandin observes, “what it didn’t have was a horticulturalist, agronomist, botanist, microbiologist, entomologist or any other person who might know something about jungle rubber and its enemies” — the lace bugs and leaf blight that laid siege to the rubber trees, the swarms of caterpillars that left areas of the plantation “as bare as bean poles.” "
BUT FORD did know what a city is supposed to look like;
"Ford’s vision was a replica Midwestern town, with modern plumbing, hospitals, schools, sidewalks, tennis courts and even a golf course. There would be no drink or other forms of immorality, but gardening for all and chaste dances every week.
Fordlandia would not just make car production more efficient. By applying the principles of rational organization to turn out goods at an ever faster pace, Ford would also be improving the lives of those who worked in the new town, bringing health and wealth to American managers and Brazilian laborers alike. In Grandin’s words, this outpost of modern capitalism was to be “an example of his particular American dream, of how Ford-style capitalism — high wages, humane benefits and moral improvement — could bring prosperity to a benighted land.”
That blueprint may have worked in Ford’s River Rouge plant in Dearborn, Mich. It most emphatically did not work in the jungle. Instead of a miniature but improved North American city, what Ford created was a broiling, pestilential hellhole of disease, vice and violence, closer to Dodge City than peaceable Dearborn."
As new cities are formed today, Fordlandia appears to offer some valuable lessons in the creation of Charter Cities.
"Ford’s Amazon team had plenty of able men, but as Grandin observes, “what it didn’t have was a horticulturalist, agronomist, botanist, microbiologist, entomologist or any other person who might know something about jungle rubber and its enemies” — the lace bugs and leaf blight that laid siege to the rubber trees, the swarms of caterpillars that left areas of the plantation “as bare as bean poles.” "
BUT FORD did know what a city is supposed to look like;
"Ford’s vision was a replica Midwestern town, with modern plumbing, hospitals, schools, sidewalks, tennis courts and even a golf course. There would be no drink or other forms of immorality, but gardening for all and chaste dances every week.
Fordlandia would not just make car production more efficient. By applying the principles of rational organization to turn out goods at an ever faster pace, Ford would also be improving the lives of those who worked in the new town, bringing health and wealth to American managers and Brazilian laborers alike. In Grandin’s words, this outpost of modern capitalism was to be “an example of his particular American dream, of how Ford-style capitalism — high wages, humane benefits and moral improvement — could bring prosperity to a benighted land.”
That blueprint may have worked in Ford’s River Rouge plant in Dearborn, Mich. It most emphatically did not work in the jungle. Instead of a miniature but improved North American city, what Ford created was a broiling, pestilential hellhole of disease, vice and violence, closer to Dodge City than peaceable Dearborn."
As new cities are formed today, Fordlandia appears to offer some valuable lessons in the creation of Charter Cities.
posted by Matthew E. Kahn at 7:48 AM
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