He especially emphasizes how the war accelerated the change in the way that Daimler-Benz compensated its employees. The company shifted from a socially oriented system that took into account the worker's family status and age to one based on pay for production. While Gregor implicitly criticizes this trend on moral grounds, he does show that management sought to conform more closely to market signals in valuing the output of its workforce. In the opinion of this reviewer, the en tire discussion of the modernization debate could have been omitted. Clearly, Zittelmann and the other German scholars who have followed him have missed the point.
Modernization is a culture bound concept with no universal meaning.
From an economic standpoint, what produces the largest volume of goods demanded by consumers at the least cost is the best. The machines that equip factories, contrary to the fantasies of many German engineers, need not be the newest. The standard of measurement is the satisfaction of consumer wants, not an arbitrary definition of modernity. Gregor also discusses the issue of Blitzkrieg economics. This concept, developed by the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Nicholas Kaldor, one of its members, and Alan Milward, holds that low German armaments production before February 1942 was due to a lack of demand on the part of the Wehrmacht.