Talk:Mass production/Archives/2014

Wrongly attributed quote

The Quote "The absence in the United States of those vast accumulations of wealth which favor the expenditures of large sums on articles of mere luxury... impact to the productions of American industry a character distinct from that of other countries' industries. [Production is geared toward] articles suited to the wants of the whole people" has no reference and seems to be wrongly attributed to Tocqueville (I haven't found this sentence or even one close to it in Tocqueville's "Democracy in America"). Instead it seems to belong to the Catalog for the 1851 London Crystal Palace exhibition, quoted in Murphy et al. ‘Income Distribution, Market Size, and Industrialization’ (The Quarterly Journal of Economics 104, no. 3 (8 January 1989): 537–564. doi:10.2307/2937810.) as quoted in p. 50 of Rosenberg, Nathan. Inside the Black Box: Technology and Economics. Cambridge University Press, 1982. I don't have access to the latter so I don't know if this quote is correct. Furthermore, this doesn't have so much to do with the homogeneity of consumers as with income equality in 19th century US.

The original 2006 edit was: 19:34, 12 December 2006‎ Bigmikey1558 (→‎Added some info about de Tocqueville's take on why America accepted mass production so well... namely, homogenous consumers)

— Preceding unsigned comment added by Torotazo (talk • contribs) 16:34, 6 March 2014 (UTC)