Volume 20, Number 17 · November 1, 1973
Running Out of Gas
By Emma Rothschild
The present afflictions of the automobile business—from political and financial disdain to consumer preference for small cars—are a sickness born in past strength. Like all dominant national industries—and like, for example, the British railroad industry in the mid-nineteenth century—the auto business depended for its early, glorious growth on the sustenance of social and institutional partiality. Such support provided roads, a favorable tax structure, a dispersal of cities and jobs. It encouraged the decay of alternative modes of transportation, and suspended rational calculations of the costs of auto development and auto waste: it made possible the great and sustained power of American demand for automobiles.
Feature, 2064 words
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