Letters in the FT: On Henry Ford, competitive consumption and our doom

IMO, the only two national UK daily newspapers worthy of your close attention are the Financial Times and the Morning Star. I’ve yet to have a letter in the Star, but I am now in double figures in the pink’un…

Here’s the latest. I didn’t mention positional goods because of space.

History already provides a rough approximation of what Professor Andrew Oswald suggests in his letter “Thought experiment: what if no one buys a new car?” (FT, April 30).

Henry Ford’s Model-T dominated new car sales in the early 1920s USA. Sturdy, easily repairable, and cheap, the Tin Lizzy kept competitors flummoxed. They (including General Motors and Chrysler) pivoted to minor stylistic flourishes for their new models, gambling that buyers would privilege “distinction” over performance. They won their bet: Ford dug in, tried to compete even harder on price but lost and eventually discontinued the T and – after a six month retooling of his production line – launched the Model-A. As Professor Oswald says “humans are dragged into harmful “keeping-up-with-the-Joneses” status races of many sorts”. Indeed, and this is now costing the earth. As species go, we are not always the sharpest tool in the box.