More About Cars and Economy

The marketization of automobiles can be used to construct social structure and determine distribution of wealth. Car production is heavily influenced by the intended customer since a producer needs to develop a product that is appealing and compelling to particular audience. A producer will not spend his resources creating a car for someone that cannot afford it regardless. Thus explains the existence of Coach-builders. During the Gilded Age in American History, 1870-1900, automobiles were marketed to the upper class. Car were not sold in the manner they are in current time. It consisted of a two step process: first the buyer selected an automobile manufacturer to provide only the rolling chassis, comprising: chassis, drivetrain. Then the customer would approach a coach-builder, requesting a personal body design to be fitted on the new chassis. Initially, the long-established and refined skills and tools. This process, being very expensive and inefficient, made it impossible to be sold to middle and lower class. Surprisingly, during the same time frame, the top 1% controlled more than 20% of total income in America. Juxtaposing the mode of car production being solely for the wealthy and the fact that the 1% controlled most of the income available in the US in that time frame, it is evident that marketization of automobiles relates to the inequality of wealth in given society.   

What Cars Say about the Gilded Age

Studying cars can provide insight into the culture of a society. Cars became a vital component in American society since the mid-twentieth century. By the 1940s, virtually every middle class and upper class household had a car. Now they are an extension of cultural and artistic values. This is the case even during the Gilded Age. The replacement of coach-builders resulted in cars with a lack uniqueness and diversity since cars were now not individually handcrafted and tailored to person. Cars were now bland and mass produced. These changes mimicked the culture of the time. The era of interchangeable parts and assembly line resulted in the devaluation of skilled labor and overall humanity. People were now simply tools that could be thrown in and out of factories at the disposal of the employer. In fact, this careless disregard for human life and individuality gave rise to term “Gilded Age,” or underlying social problems that were masked by a thin gold lucrative plating of economic success for the 1%. The coach-builder system revealed that the individuality and humanity was reserved for the wealthy while the rest of society plunged into the era of mass production: working tirelessly in factoring in poor, barely survivable conditions.

Coding and Biology

Many people don’t see coding and biology as going together. The only instance anyone probably heard of is, DNA coding, which is not exactly done in Java or MATLAB. But soon, you will find that these two components are going to be intertwined. The reason is, coding aids both diagnosis and research of medical diseases.  Scientist and Doctors can use codes to analyze a patient’s medical report quicker and cross reference with previous cases to more efficiently treat patients. In the same way, doctors are currently using coding constructs to study tumors and determine the stage, drug resistance and prognosis of cancer in patients. This task is usually extraneous and time consuming: going through each line of DNA and find a mutation or similarity between other cancers. But codes and computer can doe this thousands of times faster and more accurately.