
Fordlandia - codyjames
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/fordlandia/
======
nimbius
Ah the paragon of american assembly line manufacturing, Henry Ford. As a
millennial its taken me a while to get the real dirt on the guy, as in america
highschools extol only his virtue.

Did you know Ford had his own secret police after he doubled the salary of his
workforce?

To qualify for his doubled salary, the worker had to be thrifty and continent.
He had to keep his home neat and his children healthy, and, if he were below
the age of twenty-two, to be married. he created a division within the Ford
Motor Company to keep everyone in line. It was known as the Ford Sociological
Department

Henry Ford’s paternalism even extended the point where you needed the
company’s permission if you wanted to buy a car, which included a requirement
to be married and have children.

[https://jalopnik.com/when-henry-fords-benevolent-secret-
poli...](https://jalopnik.com/when-henry-fords-benevolent-secret-police-ruled-
his-wo-1549625731)

~~~
shard972
How much of those policies Ford was implienting can be attributed to the
culture of the time? I understand in today's culture such a pushing of family
values is pretty much illegal but i wonder how many other companies at the
time had similar kinds of policies.

~~~
eecc
Adriano Olivetti, although much later in time didn’t hoist his demands on the
workforce. He did lay out a huge amount of benefits that nobody in it’s right
mind would complain about though... yet most of this drive died with him, as
the rest of the Italian industrials preferred confrontation and stashing of
their material proceedings abroad in Switzerland... perhaps it had something
to do with the witchunt against anything remotely Socialist

------
Kronopath
The part of the article that starts with this paragraph is particularly
enlightening:

> In implementing his vision, Ford faced cultural and climactic obstacles.
> People in Brazil were, for instance, used to working in the early morning,
> then taking a break during the hottest parts of the day, and later coming
> back to work. This didn’t fit with Ford’s ideal nine-to-five workday. Also,
> back in the States, Ford had created an industrial system where workers
> could actually afford to buy the products they made, but in the Amazon there
> wasn’t that much to buy. “There was no consumer society within the Amazon so
> they didn’t actually need the high wages that Ford was promising,” Grandin
> elaborates. So “they would work a few weeks or a few months and then they
> would disappear and … go back into the jungle to work their plots, to
> produce their own food, and maybe they come back the following year, and
> this would drive the Ford managers mad.” Ford’s turnover-reducing strategies
> didn’t work in Amazon like they had in Detroit.

This is a great example of how _you can 't just transplant a culture_ and
expect it to work flawlessly. Cultures evolve to fit the environment that
surrounds them, and attempting to blindly copy things that worked in one
environment, and assuming they'll work in another, is folly.

------
oxymoron
Rob Dunn also tells the story of Fordlandia in Never out of Season
([https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/031626072X](https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/031626072X)).
It’s a quick and interesting read of why we need crop diversity, and has a
couple of really interesting cautionary tales.

The most enticing one to me was the story of how Cassava was saved from
disaster in Africa. Somehow a certain mealybug crossed over from Cassavas
native range in South America, and free from its one antagonists, it spread
like wildfire and threatened the sustenance of millions. A few lone
researchers tracked down the native habitat of the mealy bug in Peru, and
identified a certain wasp that only prayed on that specific mealybug. They
managed to introduce it Africa, thereby potentially saving millions from
starvations.

Dunn’s case for crop diversity is all in all pretty compelling. I try to pitch
it when I get the chance, because it deserves more attention!

~~~
nabeards
Oh how quickly the blight would destroy the rubber trees of Southeast Asia...

------
Myrmornis
The photos make it look like it's ruined today, but it's a fairly normal small
central Amazonian town. There are nice beaches on the banks of the Tapajós
nearby. The roads aren't great in the rainy season.

~~~
gordon_freeman
I would have appreciated this article more if author were to add more photos
of the well-functioning small town it has today .

------
madez
> biopiracy

What a load of. The privatization and capitalization of literally _everything_
is crazy. I despise companies like Nestlé for trying to capitalize common
goods like drinking water. This obsession on the one-dimensional metric of
money makes the rich richer, and the poor poorer.

~~~
hueving
There is a legitimate argument behind treating water as a market good like
anything else. There is an incredible amount of waste due to water rights in
California (e.g. Almond growing during droughts) because water isn't sold in
an auction.

We obviously need some token amount guaranteed for drinking water. But the
rest used for industrial and farming purposes should be auctioned by the
government.

~~~
madez
I see the problems you describe, but if you sell the rights in auctions you
once again boil it down to the one-dimensional metric of money. I think not
just how much one is willing to pay, but also what it'll be used for, is
relevant.

------
jimmcslim
I can recommend Jóhann Jóhannsson's Fordlandia [1] (also responsible for the
soundtrack to Arrival, and sadly recently deceased) as worth a listen,
inspired by the Fordlândia experiment.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordlandia_(album)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fordlandia_\(album\))

~~~
tomjakubowski
Oh no, I hadn't heard Jóhannsson had died. What a terrible loss.

I'll be listening to IBM 1401, A User's Manual tonight.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBw_wSoVQrY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBw_wSoVQrY)

------
8bitsrule
I liked the part where, thanks to Ford's Rules, a small off-property island
nearby hosted a bar and sex workers.

Also the enforcement of the 8-4 shift, despite workers being used to avoiding
the hottest hours of the day.

------
emmelaich
Previously discussed with respect to a Guardian article here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12324004](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12324004)

------
mberning
Milton Hershey did something very similar in Cuba.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/in-
cubas-h...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/in-cubas-
hershey-where-an-american-experiment-ended-bitterly-hopes-
stir/2015/05/05/87d40942-e84d-11e4-8581-633c536add4b_story.html?utm_term=.9b78ccd016ba)

------
ateesdalejr
Oh, brave new world.

~~~
Covzire
I didn't know much about Henry Ford when I read that book so I was a little
amused at first that he would be a central background character of a
futuristic novel. About halfway through I read parts of his biography and
things clicked. Great book by the way.

------
Stratoscope
> _Ford hadn’t bothered to learn anything about botany or agronomy before
> embarking on his Fordlândia experiment. He didn’t trust the kinds of experts
> that could’ve warned him what he was getting into. In fact, he didn’t trust
> experts at all — he was a figure-it-out type, skeptical of fancy educations
> and titles._

> _Rubber trees had never been grown in the Amazon in the way that the Ford
> company was trying to grow them: in dense plantations, with trees planted in
> tight rows. This growing style might have worked in the Southeast Asian
> plantations run by the Europeans, but that’s because the bugs there hadn’t
> evolved to eat rubber. In Brazil, this density ended up creating an
> environment where the native bugs that fed on rubber trees thrived.
> Basically, Ford built a giant bug incubator, where close proximity helped
> pests and blight spread._

> _Strangely enough, despite all of the time and money he invested in
> Fordlândia, [Henry Ford] never actually went to visit it himself. He had
> orchestrated the whole fiasco from his home, thousands of miles away, in
> Michigan._

This sounds like a few present-day startups, such as the one I read about here
a few years ago. Someone in SF met a fellow developer, and the conversation
went something like this:

"You work at a startup? Neat! What does the company do?"

"We're disrupting parking."

"Oh, that's very cool. So you've run a parking lot or worked at one, and
that's given you some better ideas on how to run it?"

"No, we haven't done any of that. You have to understand, we're not interested
in doing things the old way. We're _disrupting_ parking!"

~~~
please_choose
Garrett Camp never ran a taxi company. Bill Gates never ran a computer
business. Etc. All them did know the problem they were solving though.

Previous knowledge of running a parking lot is not causal with startup
failure. I think a better way to be critical is the fact that they say they're
"disrupting" parking lots, but can't describe the problem they're solving.

~~~
Buge
>Bill Gates never ran a computer business.

Yes he did.

>At age 17, Gates formed a venture with Allen, called Traf-O-Data, to make
traffic counters based on the Intel 8008 processor.[1]

And the idea that someone needs to have run a computer business in the past in
order to run a computer business in the future is illogical. It means that no
one would ever be able to start running a computer business. The requirement
should not be running a business in the past, but having some experience with
that type of business in the past. Bill Gates had tons of computer experience.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates)

~~~
please_choose
"It means that no one would ever be able to start running a computer business.
The requirement should not be running a business in the past, but having some
experience with that type of business in the past. Bill Gates had tons of
computer experience."

Thanks for helping me make my point.

Also, I didn't say "Bill Gates" and "Microsoft". You're right, Traf-O-Data was
a "modest success". It reinforces my point.

~~~
emodendroket
Right, who could forget the epoch-making work of Traf-O-Data.

~~~
please_choose
Since when is success dependent on the amount of people in the world that know
about it?

------
RickJWag
At the time, I'm sure Ford's ideas were considered very progressive and a gift
to the indigenous people.

Today, he's the target of a critical article like this one. (There's more
criticism of Winston Churchill on HN today, too.)

My theory is that the world has become so prosperous (at least parts of it)
that people have no idea what's good and what's not any more.

~~~
emodendroket
Perhaps if you were, say, Indian, you'd feel less favorably disposed to
Churchill, even if you did not live a life of opulence. You don't have to
agree with someone else's perspective to be able to understand it.

