[p2p-research] decentralizing open source bike production?

[Kevin Carson]

On 9/4/09, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Very interesting question posed here, but is is 'absolutely' true that scane
> trumps decentralized production?

> see: http://worldbike.org/what-open-source-bicycle-design

> "
> What’s hard is open-sourcing the production process. Bicycles that sell in
> big box stores for $79 are made by the millions in huge factories in Asia.
> The massive economies of scale allow these producers to build and train
> robots to cut and miter the metal tubing and weld the frames together. To
> get the Worldbike concept to that level of production will require a
> significant leap from where we are now. And yet, without doing so, our
> customers will be forced to pay higher prices.

I strongly suspect that these alleged economies of scale result from
myopically focusing on one facet of the total cost package, in total
disregard of all the rest.  The enormous costs from in-process
inventories and warehouses full of finished goods inventory that come
from running the production machines to full capacity to minimize unit
costs for each step, and the cargo ships full of inventory that result
from concentrating production in a handful of offshored facilities,
probably offset the savings from maximizing utilization of individual
machines.  Lean production achieves economies by using less
product-specific machinery, scaled to local markets and with
production geared to demand, even though the unit costs per individual
machine are higher.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html