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| Economy |
| If you want to know where the world economy is headed, look at the bottom of this toy car |
| 2024-02-05 |
| [WAPO] What if I said you could read real world history on the underside of your kids’ Hot Wheels? In my Philippine childhood in the 1970s, my brother Hector and I played with die-cast toy cars. I remember the first time I looked at the underside of these cars, soon after I had learned to read, and realized they had been made in different countries in different years. Some were made in the United Kingdom and the United States; the newer ones were made in Japan. Decades later, as my work as an economist brought my family to the United States, my two children got toy cars nearly identical to mine — first made in China and, later, Vietnam. We now have a small collection of these cars, and occasionally I use them as a teaching tool. I ask students in my economics classes to inspect the cars’ undersides, and together we trace the gradual movement of toy car manufacturing: from England and the United States in the 1960s to Japan in the mid-1970s, from South Korea in the mid-1980s to China in the late 1990s and Vietnam after. |
| Posted by:Besoeker |
| #8 But then, American computer companies have never been the same since we started importing computers from China. |
| Posted by: Abu Laptop (same as Abu Uluque but on a different computer.) 2024-02-05 13:20 |
| #7 After WWII, Japanese used beer cans to make toys for export to the United States. Desperate for income, they used anything they could get their hands on to make anything they could imagine that might sell. In those days we thought if it was Made in Japan it was cheap and trashy. But after the Japanese recovered from the war they showed the world how real cars should be made. Ford, General Motors and Chrysler were never the same after that. |
| Posted by: Abu Laptop (same as Abu Uluque but on a different computer.) 2024-02-05 13:17 |
| #6 I remember when Made in Japan was translated as Inferior Quality. |
| Posted by: Deacon Blues 2024-02-05 12:16 |
| #5 As a young lad in the 60's, Matchbox cars were UK-made, Hot Wheels were US, baby! |
| Posted by: Frank G 2024-02-05 11:24 |
| #4 The whole question of 'what is an import' has become a major problem over the past 30 years. Many autos, SUVs and light trucks, have final assembly in Alabama, at plants owned by Mercedes Benz, Honda, Hundai and Toyota. Some of the engines come from the engine assembly plant in Huntsville, Al but others come from Mexico and Canada. Other parts come from East Asia and Germany for example. |
| Posted by: lord garth 2024-02-05 10:50 |
| #3 ^ You of course remember the airplanes in the breakfast cereal boxes. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2024-02-05 10:05 |
| #2 When I was a kid in the 1950s we had a neighbor who owned a small toy store. Every once in a while he'd give us a toy cars. They were stamped Made in Japan even then. |
| Posted by: EMSArtifact 2024-02-05 10:01 |
| #1 You would think by now the enviros would be trying to ban toy cars as being just as awful as toy guns in terms of what they teach children to accept as normal. |
| Posted by: M. Murcek 2024-02-05 06:46 |