Astral Codex Ten

Toyota

5 min read

Toyota

Article

Toyota is a recurring brand in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between March 25, 2021 and April 05, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “If both Ford and Toyota ban blacks at the same time”; “all of the giant world-spanning Toyota-style companies you get in the next round of development”; “There’s no way you’ll be able to outcompete Ford, Toyota, and Tesla”. It most often appears alongside Tesla, America, Bill Gates.

Metadata

  • Category: Brands
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: March 25, 2021
  • Last seen: April 05, 2023

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

More Antifragile, Diversity Libertarianism, And Corporate Censorship
March 25, 2021 · Original source
Diversity libertarianism is usually in favor of companies being allowed to do a wide range of things, because it ensures everyone will be well-served. If you assume an arbitrarily large number of uncorrelated companies, then whatever the thing you want is, there's at least one existing or easy-to-start company doing it. If Ford refuses to sell cars to black people, Toyota should see a profit opportunity and step in. If both Ford and Toyota ban blacks at the same time, some upstart like Tesla should step in. If Ford, Toyota, and Tesla all do it, some guy with a wrench who's always dreamed of making cars in his garage should notice a billion-dollar business opportunity lying on the ground, get seed capital from equally greedy investors, and solve the problem.
Book Review: How Asia Works
June 28, 2021 · Original source
But even beyond this, Studwell talks up the almost spiritual benefits of land reform. In a typical land reform measure, an equal amount of land gets allotted to every peasant family. This is about as close as anything ever comes to the completely fair starting position that eg John Locke liked to fantasize about. Everyone gets to work for themselves in their own little small business, reaping the consequences of their own decisions. The generation who grow up immediately after a land reform tend to be thrifty, hard-working, honest, and civic-minded. They go on to found all of the giant world-spanning Toyota-style companies you get in the next round of development. Maybe this is just a coincidence; most people are farmers, and most farmers are affected by land reform, and the land-reform stage of the development pathway is separated by the found-giant-companies stage by about a generation. But Studwell thinks it's more than this, and maybe it's more than a coincidence that Asia and America have come to fetishize the virtues of small farmers in pretty much the same way.
Imagine having to start your own car company in Zimbabwe. Your past experience is "peasant farmer". You have no idea how to make cars. The local financial system can muster up only a few million dollars in seed funding, and the local manufacturing expertise is limited to a handful of engineers who have just returned from foreign universities. Maybe if you're very lucky you can eventually succeed at making cars that run at all. But there's no way you'll be able to outcompete Ford, Toyota, and Tesla. All these companies have billions of dollars and some of the smartest people in the world working for them, plus decades of practice and lots of proprietary technology. Your cars will inevitably be worse and more expensive than theirs. Every country that's solved this problem and started a local car industry has done so by putting high tariffs on foreign cars. Locals will have to buy your cars, so even if you're not exactly making a profit after a few years, at least you're not completely useless either.
Most Technologies Aren't Races
April 05, 2023 · Original source
Who “won” the automobile race? Karl Benz? Henry Ford? There were many steps between the first halting prototype and widespread adoption. Benz and Ford both personally got rich, their companies remain influential today, and Mannheim and Detroit remain important auto manufacturing hubs. But other companies like Toyota and Tesla are equally important, the overall balance of power didn’t change, and today all developed countries have automobiles.