Who Lost Detroit!

...If there are few new concepts and no alternatives offered, there is abundant material for speculating about the requirements for the next American century and an emerging global economy...

...Within Ford, quality engineering and consumer needs had declining priority...

...Solutions may be beyond Halberstam's intent in this volume...

...Fair enough...

...commitment to Vietnam (The Making of a Quagmire and The Best and the Brightest) and about the lords of the press (The Powers That Be), now tackles this "second industrial revolution...

...The Reckoning rambles and is repetitious...

...Are we all responsible for the misuse and unjust allocation of resources...

...What's more, many of the themes have been treated elsewhere...

...The Reckoning is a comparative history of the Ford and Nissan companies and of the societies within which they emerged and which they then helped reshape...

...Is our answer a restoration of the competitive model...

...In contrast, he deplores an emerging two-class service economy in the United States...

...Halberstam tells his ambitious tale chiefly through profiles of leading personalities—Henry Ford, Yoshisuki Ayukawa ("part Henry Ford, part Alfred P. Sloan"), and their associates and successors—who created and then fought over the directions of the companies...

...In contrast, Ford burned out men and machines under the pressure for short-run profits for stockholders...

...At its essence it offers a telling condemnation not just of an industry but of an economic system, underscoring that the heart of the challenge for Americans is in the United States, not in Japan...

...While the Japanese companies listened carefully to Consumer Reports and other critics, one Ford man who moved on to Toyota reported, the Americans dismissed critics as "the product of hostile do-gooders...

...At its best, history is dramatic, and the shifting back and forth among the engineers, managers, workers, and tycoons on both sides of the Pacific helps one understand the two cultures...

...The gossip and anecdotes often add little to the analysis, which trails off...

...For whom...

...As the American industry became a "shared" monopoly, it lost its internal competition...

...Reckoning for what...

...And he foresaw a similar opportunity for Japan as it acquired Western industrial arts...

...One is introduced to the new breed of modern managers, including Robert McNamara and lesser known "whiz kids," to Lee Ia-cocca, and to their Japanese counterparts...

...A diligent reporter, Halberstam interviewed a wide range of participants...

...Halberstam then summarizes how Third World producing areas challenged their assigned role as energy producers for the northern tier industrial world, forcing an awareness of the latter's vulnerability...

...Ignored were such Japanese practices as having workers on the line function as inspectors for quality control...

...Halberstam deserves credit for trying to put so much together in a popular narrative...

...Labor leaders such as Walter Reuther (a visionary caught in the system) and Tetsuo Masuda are also featured...

...Producers and workers in the United States are threatened, industrial communities are depressed, and the nation debates this challenge to its supremacy...

...But he never develops this analysis or comes to suggest alternative ways for Americans to deal with these producers and the corporate merchants of oil who still dominate much of the trade...

...Yet The Reckoning is more successful in telling how than in explaining why...

...Or if the centralizing direction of industry is inevitable, what role should government play as the marketplace disappears...

...Its opening suggests that the truncated "American century" was based upon what is conventionally described as cheap energy and the production for mass consumption it made possible...

...Journalist David Halberstam, who has previously written about the U.S...

...He wrote "The Politics of Oil" and "The Brotherhood of Oil...

...For Detroit, this came to mean big cars and the big profits they generated...

...Halberstam views favorably the planning behind Japan's "communal capitalism," where growth is shared and no one may become too rich...

...Having wealth and power distributed so unequally is not his thesis, however concerned he is...

...Robert Engler (Robert Engler is professor of political science at the Graduate School and at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York...

...Small cars, fuel efficiency, and safety were resisted...

...The reader learns about the internal politics of the two corporations and about their relationships to banks, unions, and, to a limited degree, to governments and the political process...

...And beneath the hoods of more familiar domestic models one increasingly finds Japanese engines...

...While aware of the competitive aspects of the economy, he notes the respect for high-level public servants who serve as arbiters for the public good...

...But the moralistic title suggests he has something more in mind...

...He attributed Germany's rise in industrial leadership to its coming late to the industrial scene while having a highly controlled dynastic culture...

...audiences, the Japanese sections help the general reader appreciate the disciplined efforts behind that country's emergence from military defeat and economic adversity...

...But there are few clues as to the lessons he sees for Americans...

...In some respects the entire book is a detailed case study of the fundamental distinction between industry as community-oriented production and business as exploitative waste, a thesis argued by Thor-stein Veblen in a series of essays at the turn of the century...

...There is a burgeoning literature on reconstructing the economy...

...There are sympathetic accounts of engineers and plant managers who struggle to keep the corporate focus upon technological development, often against the strenuous opposition of financial officers who guard the bottom line...

...While the American sketches are likely to be familiar to U.S...