Word: rothschild
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...auto industry is suddenly overwhelmed with problems: consumer dissatisfaction, labor revolts, foreign competition, and an inability to make profits grow. These problems, according to Rothschild, "are based in historical change, and may be compared to the troubles of other industries in other times...most particularly to those of the railroads and textile mills in late-Victorian Britain. The fate of these businesses show a similar pattern: innovation, excitement, inflow of capital, rapid growth, market saturation, demand creation, decreasing productivity and return on capital, a fixation on policies of the past." She might add: subsequent resentment among workers and consumers, competition...
Although Paradise Lost is informative and concise, it is by no means comprehensive. Rothschild often begins potentially fruitful trains of thought only to leave them unresolved. For example, she discusses the way automotive philosophy developed the industry, and how the philosophy became distasteful to the American people, but she fails to explain how it altered American life. No one yet has seriously examined the effects of the automobile and automotive philosophy on American life: the rendering of culturally unique areas into drab everytowns; the massive postwar suburbanization and its neurosis-inspiring effect on the American character; the twisted notion...
AMERICAN SOCIETY KEEPS breathing life into the auto industry through subsidies (such as the gasoline tax, which is used to build more high-ways) and through discounting social externalities (such as the damage automotive pollution causes). Rothschild feels that terminal sickness and death are the only long term prospects for the industry, and that Americans must prepare themselves for a future free of the automotive burden. "American arrangements for the end of auto domination will require social and economic adjustments, like other adjustments in world history, adjustments of peculiar force which yet remain a continuing point of national change...
Paradise Lost's second major flaw is Rothschild's writing style. While the book is often intelligible, barrages of jumbled sentences and creative grammar make the reader question her very analytical ability. ("From the mid 1910s, sustained by national machine fever, the auto investment boom swerved higher and higher.") Unfortunately, she is not alone in this regard. Nader's reports are notoriously unreadable, and many of today's most valuable contributions to the field of corporate responsibility are disguised in language which can only be intended to impress the reader by confusing him. It is more than annoying that some...
They may lack the grandeur of a Romanee-Conti '59 at $200 a bottle or the finesse of a Chateau Lafite Rothschild '61 (a mere $135). Yet the new California wines now arriving on the market are the best available in quantity. "For the first time in this or any other country," says a California wine-industry consultant, Louis R. Gomberg, "there is going to be a tremendous abundance of high-quality grapes. The consumer will harvest a wine-crop bounty the like of which has never before been seen...