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> Detroit’s world-beating automotive industry squandered its technological and manufacturing advantages in a rush, pushed by Wall Street and its own financial managers, to earn easy profits from inferior products.

Alternatively, they were pushed to such thin margins by competition that they stopped innovating because anything that didn't show RoI by quarter's end was not permitted. You can see the same thing happening with Airplanes (Boeing etc),

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My understanding of history was that American car brands lowered the quality of their cars and/or could not keep up with quality of Japanese car brands.

I am also not sure about the claim that Boeing’s competitors’ low profit margins (Airbus?) caused it to sacrifice quality. Why would we exclude the possibility of Boeing (and McDonnel Douglas) execs wanting to cash out by temporarily boosting their stock price (temporarily being on the order of ~10 to 20 years before their changes could be noted to have an effect on the product).

I highly recommend reading this article [1] re: Boeing. It's the ultimate parable of late-state technocapitalism; and Airbus has really nothing to do with it.

[1]: https://newrepublic.com/article/154944/boeing-737-max-invest...

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