Something New Under The Sun Analysis

During the decades of coketown industrialization, profits flowed to the factory-owners, and wealthy entrepreneurs who made up a small portion of society. As a result, workers worked in harsh conditions, and faced constant poverty. The significance of Fordism is that it gave workers higher wages, spreading the prosperity of industrialization to the masses, and marking the beginning of consumerism. J. R. McNeill describes this best when he writes in his book Something New Under the Sun “Ford saw that sharing these gains with his workers suited his own interests…he paid laborers enough to buy a Model-T… They enjoyed an affluence and leisure that in the nineteenth century would have required an army of household servants” (Pgs 316 & 317). Ford’s increase in wages created a market for products that …show more content…
Firstly, carbon emissions increased dramatically because more cars were produced, and the combustion engine was applied in numerous ways, increasing oil consumption. Secondly, because of the high demand, oil spills and deforestation from oil drilling destroyed more tracts of land and oceans than they ever had before. However Tucker explains that another consequence of the Motown cluster was increased rubber consumption for vehicle tires. More plantations were established to supply demand, increasing deforestation. Tucker explains this when he writes “In order to create the plantations, they clear-cut the forest, burning the biomass or in some cases organizing salvage logging of valuable hardwood trees” (Pg 148). Even though rubber consumption increased dramatically over the decades, its consequences were not as significant as they could have been because synthetic rubber derived from petroleum was invented. This resulted in lower and lower dependency on deforestation and plantations, and greater dependency on oil