Posted on 12/31/2006 6:25:30 AM PST by A. Pole
AMERICAN manufacturers no longer make subway cars. They are imported now, and the skills required to make them are disappearing in the United States. Similarly, imports are an ever-bigger source of refrigerators, household furnishings, auto and aircraft parts, machine tools and a host of everyday consumer products much in demand in America, but increasingly not made here.
[...]
the experts shifted the emphasis from production to design and innovation. Let others produce what Americans think up.
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But over the long run, can invention and design be separated from production? That question is rarely asked today. The debate instead centers on the loss of well-paying factory jobs and on the swelling trade deficit in manufactured goods. When the linkage does come up, the answer is surprisingly affirmative: Yes, invention and production are intertwined.
"Most innovation does not come from some disembodied laboratory," said Stephen S. Cohen, co-director of the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy at the University of California, Berkeley. "In order to innovate in what you make, you have to be pretty good at making it — and we are losing that ability."
[...]
Franklin J. Vargo, the association’s vice president for international economic affairs, sounds even more concerned than Mr. Cohen. "If manufacturing production declines in the United States," he said, "at some point we will go below critical mass and then the center of innovation will shift outside the country and that will really begin a decline in our living standards."
[...]
"It is hard to imagine," Mr. Tonelson said, "how an international economy can remain successful if it jettisons its most technologically advanced components."
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(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Are deficits bad? Are surpluses good? Why?
I'm glad your shanty town has Internet access.
Like your old fridge - if you had to recharge it with R12 freon today, you would find that it would be cheaper to buy a new one.
And that is not because of the labor cost - it is because of regulations.
I know of a number of scientific endeavers, in the same veign, that are conducted oversees - because you can't legally do them in the US, under any circumstances.
Da. Kill the greedy kulaks.
Perhaps you're forgetting about some entries on the liabilities side: Red Ink - a comment from the Comptroller General .
Quote: To put the figures in perspective, $50 trillion is $440,000 per American household and is more than nine times as much as the median household income
I guess we'll just finance it over the next 200 years and that will make it all seem trivial, right? Or inflate it away by letting the printing presses run wild (The Nixon solution!). But wait....we have to keep spending at these levels or the Merry Go Round stops...Oops!
So we'll just hang on until the motor burns out, huh?
Kill the greedy kulaks.
And outlaw culottes!
My old frig was never repaired or maintained beyond normal cleaning.
If it made a thirty year run without a freon recharge, great - that was very unusual. And certainly, at some point, it would need one - and you cannot buy R12 anymore, again, due to regulation, not cost.
By the way, how did you dispose of it? If it was still fully charged, and you took it to the dump, you broke a number of laws.
Due to the rapid change in technology, my career today is absolutely nothing like I imagined it would be just 10 years ago. The technology I use today to do my job would have been stunning to me 10 years ago. I can get my work done from any corner of the globe just so long as I have a reliable connection to the Internet (which is rapidly becoming a given across the world).
I run a department of about 45 people. Just a few months ago I was in Albuquerque, NM - about 2,500 miles away from my branch office, and yet I had instant two-way access to all my employees with Nextel/Sprint phones and through my laptop, I had access to every application that I use daily from my Boston area office. From the viewpoint of my employees, I could just as easily have been in my office down the hallway as my business trip was totally transparent to them.
One can only imagine how different things will be 10 years from now!
Getting back to the factory jobs, it is my belief that all of this fuss over factories moving overseas is a moot point due to the rapid advances we are about to see with robotics. Within most of our lifetimes (if you are under 40), nearly all production will be fully automated. So corporations taking advantage of "cheap labor" overseas is a temporary thing. Soon enough, engineers will feed a program to a factory computer and products will be produced from raw materials untouched by human hands.
Working from the assumption that any design sent to a Chinese factory will be stolen, one can manage one's supply chain such that many of the benefits of cheap Chinese labor are enjoyed, while the risk of IP theft is mitigated.
The delivery people took it away when they brought the new one.
I think that's an oversimplification. All that is required to be successful in today's workforce (in United States) is to have a positive attitude, be receptive to change, be willing to learn new technologies and realize that nobody owes you a living.
It's not quite that simple, either. I remember 20 years ago, all the engineers were lording it over the "art majors." And now the engineers are out of work or under employed and the "art majors" are pulling down the big bucks.
Last year during the transit strike I shared a cab with an executive from Victoria's Secret. She was on the cell phone constantly with her overseas people. During a break in her phone chatter, I asked about the company's "bra making machine" that can turn out a bra without sweatshop labor. I asked if this would bring jobs back to the U.S. and her answer was a definite "no way." Apparently, it's cheaper to run the machine overseas. Then her phone rang again, she laughed and said, "I can't believe I'm destroying my country with underwear."
That is pretty close to true in some factories, already.
Then I imagine they recovered the freon and resold it to a medical company, for more than the cost of your new fridge.
I don't know any engineers that are out of work - my company currently has openings for about 1,200 of them.
That's pretty good. I'm genuinely glad to hear it. How/why did they avoid the whole H1B thing?
We owe $50 trillion? To who?
US citizenship required.
US citizenship required.
I like that, a lot. Please tell me it's a trend and not specific to your company.
Oh Please. Go play with your toys, "Todd-ster".
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