> And before people make "buggy whip manufacturer" arguments,
I've always wondered about that argument.
Weren't buggy whip manufacturers making lots of other things at the same time?
After all, a buggy whip is almost certainly used much longer by the new owner than a cars is, so I wouldn't expect a large amount of the economy to be comprised of buggy whip sales, because
a) Not many people had their own buggy (down need a buggy whip while riding a horse, only when a buggy is being pulled)
b) Those that owned a whip didn't replace them every 3-5 years anyway.
Did buggy whip sales go from 3% of GDP to nothing?
To me it always felt like a made-up "lesson" on how progress moves.
It was really was a disaster for whip companies, carriage companies and saddle makers, though, disruption didn’t proliferate as quickly then as it does today.
You can read some of the history of buggy whip makers. They were specialized manufacturers with established brands built around quality, special materials and style. Some were able to convert to new products but not all. They did survive a couple decades past the invention of the car, to your point, but once cars proliferated their sales cratered.
Whip manufacturers shouldn’t be shamed for hubris (what happened did not seem as guaranteed then as it now seems with hindsight) but they all would’ve done well to have converted into automobile manufacturing supply by the teens and many did not.
> It was really was a disaster for whip companies, carriage companies and saddle makers, though, disruption didn’t proliferate as quickly then as it does today.
I'm not contending that.
I'm saying (as far as I can determine) that cars sales alone in the US today is around 4% of the GDP. That doesn't count all the businesses employed in car manufacturing, all the businesses employed by the distribution network, by auto maintenance, ancilliary auto services (insurance, car washes, cosmetic finishing, upgrades, motorsport, etc).
My argument is that the demise of buggy whip manufacturers was accompanied by a significant expansion of employment. The replacement required much more labour than the thing it replaced.
If, at the time, buggy whip/saddlery/etc sales, distribution and manufacture collectively were the largest employers of labour, then the buggy whip argument makes sense.
I don't believe that people use buggy whips as an analogy for entire economies being destroyed, just individual industries. But fair enough, and there certainly was that expansion orders of magnitude larger than the replaced industries when the automobile proliferated.
It only took a handful of years once cars greatly proliferated in the 20s. Any adoption took longer then to proliferate than it does today, so I would be careful extrapolating from either the pace of adoption in the 20s or the pace of adoption from the invention of the automobile to the beginning of accelerated adoption. You've probably seen this famous graph. https://hbr.org/resources/images/article_assets/2013/11/FELT...
I've always wondered about that argument.
Weren't buggy whip manufacturers making lots of other things at the same time?
After all, a buggy whip is almost certainly used much longer by the new owner than a cars is, so I wouldn't expect a large amount of the economy to be comprised of buggy whip sales, because
a) Not many people had their own buggy (down need a buggy whip while riding a horse, only when a buggy is being pulled)
b) Those that owned a whip didn't replace them every 3-5 years anyway.
Did buggy whip sales go from 3% of GDP to nothing?
To me it always felt like a made-up "lesson" on how progress moves.