General Motors 1980s automation and competitive decline

GM VP big on robotics, spent fifty billion in the 1980s automating — same fifty billion that could have purchased Toyota if Japanese law had allowed it.

There was a guy at General Motors, the vice president, very big on robotics. He was going to eliminate all the hourly workers at General Motors. GM always despised the hourly workers, and it was mutual distrust between the two — terrible labor fights. These are some of the externalities that go on. This is before we had PowerPoint, and I used to see some of his presentations — he'd have $50,000 audiovisual presentations on what General Motors was doing with laser manufacturing. During the decade of the 1980s, General Motors spent fifty billion dollars automating their manufacturing facilities. Did you know that in the 1980s, if it had been legal in Japan to purchase Toyota on the stock market for a foreign company, General Motors could have purchased Toyota for fifty billion dollars? They couldn't, because Japanese laws — that's another externality — wouldn't allow an American company to purchase stock of a Japanese company in Japan.