The current copy of
Wired magazine has a marvelous cover story on the "new" industrial revolution. Its a long article (and worth every second of your time!) so I will do it a disservice by trying to condense it down to a paragraph or two, but in essence, it refers to how The Industrial Revolution consolidated the manufacturing process into the hands of a few, because the costs of setting up a manufacturing facility became well beyond the means of the common workman.
Karl Marx reportedly worried that a workman would no longer be able to afford the price of his tools, and when you compare the relatively enormous investment that Henry Ford made in his factories to the investment the Studebaker Brothers made in their blacksmith shop in South Bend, the point is well made.
The article goes on to say that this concentration of manufacturing capability excluded many new ideas from ever being produced or incorporated into the production of others. As a result, society suffered a "great leveling", as Paul Jaray has noted in his latest post in the Saab thread.
BUT......the article says. Today's digital tools are now so affordable that workmen CAN once again afford the price of their tools and so the marketplace is now able to benefit from the input and creative energy of thousands upon thousand of entrepreneurs who would have been shut out previously.
Why and how this works is fascinating reading, but one example that will appeal to all of us who have a special place reserved in our soul for cars is Local Motors, just down the road from where I sit, which is actually designing and producing "open source" vehicles with no manufacturing facility and no inventory.
Read the article and then let us have the benefit of your thinking on this.
