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To look at the loss of manufacturing as an American industry while pretending that is was solely populated by those who chose less intellectual careers on the p

To look at the loss of manufacturing as an American industry while pretending that is was solely populated by those who chose less intellectual careers on the plant floor is to overlook the fact that manufacturing, coupled with our great land expanse and growing population, was the prime enabler for the pursuit of intellectual careers since the 1930's. Most, if not all of the business practices you'll learn today in a renowned university were conceived in the laboratories of American industry. Universities were founded with the whole purpose of providing trained managers and researchers to the manufacturing industries. Unfortunately, those highly educated and trained managers failed to see that the American success story was industry itself, not their ability to make manufacturing cheaper overseas. The consequences are more than apparent. Managers have to slave to meet Wall Street's predictions and goals, hard working people have to choose a career between writing software, selling financial products, providing healthcare services or working in a derivative position of such in order to make a decent living, and those who choose the higher intellectual pursuits, well, they get to choose whether to offer you paper or plastic at the checkout counter. Sadly, those who lack a strong educational background or the finances to improve upon it will be further sidelined and alienated from the growth economy and be forced to compete for continuously devaluated and scarcer positions while being forced to hand their pay over to the few companies that can compete in a global economy. And allowing them to buy cheap flatscreens at a super warehouse is not going to vent their frustration.

tptacek 15y ago
On the whole, the people who lost the American factory jobs are still vastly better off than the significantly larger cohort of Chinese rural poor that ended up with those jobs. There's probably a lot of worthwhile policy steps we can take to help American ex-factory workers, but reclaiming the factories needn't be one of them. Factories may be a dead end.
- rbanffy 15y ago
  You have to find another way to generate value. That can end up being hard if the research attached to the manufacturing operation gets behind the competition.
- jsavimbi 15y ago
  How are they vastly better off? Please visit any city in the Rust Belt. Get out of the house and ask how any service sector employees are making ends meet. They went from having honest, well-paying jobs that enabled them to build lives, families and communities to watching their source of income shipped overseas by the very people they worked their asses off to send to college all because the manufacturing industry's market efficiencies didn't match those they taught at business schools. Policy steps? Open more fast food franchises? What do you do when you terminally impoverish a large swath of your population after exploiting them for sixty years in order to achieve some financial utopia that they didn't need anyway? You can't sell them on owning a house while they make a marginal wage. You can't sell them on seeking out intellectual knowledge while the cost of education soars. You can't keep bombarding them with mainstream images of prosperity when they're worried about making rent. They're going to turn to anyone with a message of hope, no matter how ludicrous. It happens all the time. And then you've lost them. Reopening factories may not be the panacea, but you cannot innovate across the board when you don't build anything. You cannot innovate while locking a segment of the population out of the process just because they don't have a degree or know the secret handshake. It's the same reason why you can't lock women or minorities out of the process. Otherwise we'd just be a bunch of white guys building apps that address white guy, first world problems and the world would be a shitty place. This is the point where the new CEO, Mr. Obama, has the honor of addressing the company to tell everyone that we hired way too many people for a product that nobody wants and we'll be retaining the software patents and letting everyone else go. A task he's understandably reluctant to perform. Increased government spending, entitlement and tax reform, forcing the Chinese to change their monetary policy, investing in nenewable energies, nuking Pyongyang, ok maybe not nuking but really doing something about Mr. Kim would be nice; these are all hard steps that need to be taken but they can only be taken once the leadership comes forward and admits that we have some hard times ahead and that we need to scale back the American Dream a notch and get real. Unfortunately, one half of the leadership has spent the past twenty years stoking fear and bigotry into a frothy mass with a mixture of penis and religion while the other half has been betting on the kitten at the dog fight, all coaxed on by sources of information that wish the free drama to keep playing itself out. It's time to take a long ,hard look at the landscape and realize that we have a problem and that we need to close the gap before we're in true banana republic territory.

tptacek 15y ago

On the whole, the people who lost the American factory jobs are still vastly better off than the significantly larger cohort of Chinese rural poor that ended up with those jobs. There's probably a lot of worthwhile policy steps we can take to help American ex-factory workers, but reclaiming the factories needn't be one of them. Factories may be a dead end.

rbanffy 15y ago
You have to find another way to generate value. That can end up being hard if the research attached to the manufacturing operation gets behind the competition.
jsavimbi 15y ago
How are they vastly better off? Please visit any city in the Rust Belt. Get out of the house and ask how any service sector employees are making ends meet. They went from having honest, well-paying jobs that enabled them to build lives, families and communities to watching their source of income shipped overseas by the very people they worked their asses off to send to college all because the manufacturing industry's market efficiencies didn't match those they taught at business schools. Policy steps? Open more fast food franchises? What do you do when you terminally impoverish a large swath of your population after exploiting them for sixty years in order to achieve some financial utopia that they didn't need anyway? You can't sell them on owning a house while they make a marginal wage. You can't sell them on seeking out intellectual knowledge while the cost of education soars. You can't keep bombarding them with mainstream images of prosperity when they're worried about making rent. They're going to turn to anyone with a message of hope, no matter how ludicrous. It happens all the time. And then you've lost them. Reopening factories may not be the panacea, but you cannot innovate across the board when you don't build anything. You cannot innovate while locking a segment of the population out of the process just because they don't have a degree or know the secret handshake. It's the same reason why you can't lock women or minorities out of the process. Otherwise we'd just be a bunch of white guys building apps that address white guy, first world problems and the world would be a shitty place. This is the point where the new CEO, Mr. Obama, has the honor of addressing the company to tell everyone that we hired way too many people for a product that nobody wants and we'll be retaining the software patents and letting everyone else go. A task he's understandably reluctant to perform. Increased government spending, entitlement and tax reform, forcing the Chinese to change their monetary policy, investing in nenewable energies, nuking Pyongyang, ok maybe not nuking but really doing something about Mr. Kim would be nice; these are all hard steps that need to be taken but they can only be taken once the leadership comes forward and admits that we have some hard times ahead and that we need to scale back the American Dream a notch and get real. Unfortunately, one half of the leadership has spent the past twenty years stoking fear and bigotry into a frothy mass with a mixture of penis and religion while the other half has been betting on the kitten at the dog fight, all coaxed on by sources of information that wish the free drama to keep playing itself out. It's time to take a long ,hard look at the landscape and realize that we have a problem and that we need to close the gap before we're in true banana republic territory.