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this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2025
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The same thing happened in the 80s with Japan. The Japanese were no longer making crappy cars but small and very reliable, affordable cars. Detroit was still making rust buckets, obsessing over powerful engines with bodies that rotted out and defects galore. Detroit got beaten up badly (Chrysler had to get a gov bailout) until they cleaned up their act and improved their products. Protecting Detroit from competition would've just saddled US consumers with decades more of crappy, overpriced, low quality, cars.
https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/how-detroits-automakers-went-from-kings-of-the-road-to-roadkill/
We still don't let in the small pickups the rest of the world enjoys.
Did Japan back then pay their assembly line workers the equivalent of $5k USD/year (in today's dollars) and have nearly no worker protections? Not a rhetorical question; I just don't know. Seems like Japan had a better standard of living back then compared to Chinese workers now, so I would guess their workers were compensated and treated better.
Not defending US auto corps (or any corp for that matter). The regulatory capture in the US is insane, and workers aren't treated as well as most of the rest of the first world.
Japan used state capitalism to promote it’s auto industry and other key sectors to sustain strong growth. America’s weakened billionaire owned government system is just being strip mined into the ground. We won’t be able to compete in an economy that’s only product is wealth extraction because of our massive corruption.
Back then American industries were just complacent due to insufficient competition, and Japan's industrial development was a bit of a miracle (that "living in year 2000 since 1980s" joke).