Thursday 730
Mostly summarized from Gregory Mankiw’s Principles of Economics, 5th Ed. PART 9 The Real Economy in the Long Run Chapter 28 of 36 Unemployment Section 20 of 21 … Henry Ford introduced modern techniques of production to the automobile industry. Ford, rather than building expensive cars for the rich with small teams of skilled craftsmen, he built inexpensive cars for everyone on assembly lines with unskilled workers who performed repetitive simple tasks. The output of this assembly process was the Model T Ford. … In 1914, Ford introduced another innovation, the $5 workday. It was about twice the going wage for unskilled workers, far above the equilibrium wage. When the daily $5 wage was announced there were long lines of job seekers outside the Ford factories. The number of workers willing to work at this wage far exceeded the amount of workers Ford needed. Ford's high-wage policy had the effects predicted by efficiency-wage theory, absenteeism fell, turnover fell, and productivity r...