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."
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"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 ...
It is not a trend, it is a law, for contractors in certain capacities. DoD work of certain types, eg.
Don't you hate it when the truth makes your post look stupid?
It is not a trend, it is a law, for contractors in certain capacities. DoD work of certain types, eg.
Crap.
Here is my take -- companies of all kinds outside the gubmint sector are going to start finding out that the citizenship requirement is a good thing. H1B guys will eventually go back to their home countries and take corporate "secrets" with them. There is no sense in training your overseas competition just to save a few bucks in the short term.
You may be correct.
No truth in sight, kid!
Example: Like them or not, we lost the video game industry to the Japanese years ago. It's taken American companies decades to win back even a portion of it. The Japanese firms so thoroughly dominated the field -- a multi-billion dollar industry -- that many folks even forgot that video games were invented in the U.S.
If you say so, old timer.
Yours is the best comment on this thread. Consider that farming/agriculture required about 50% of the US workforce just 100 years ago, it's now less than 5% and we produce TOO MUCH food, how much gets thrown away now? Farmers differ widely but all have one thing in common : good mechanics. Object lesson : manufacturing is like farming, organic robots slaving away in the fields gradually being replaced by mechanical robots slaving away in the fields. Robots don't unionize but they do need maintenance and energy-as-food.
So the cheap foreign labor epoch will pass into history just as the US farm force went from 50% to 5% in 100 years with improving robotics technology. Darwin was RIGHT : evolution is the survival of the fittest. That applies to manufacturing just as it does to superbugs that survive all the antibiotics medicos throw at them; WE are the superbugs, SOME of us will survive whatever storms nature throws at us in the future.
Well, no. Nowadays, a home will likely become functionally obsolete before it ever decays beyond repair.
I am not as disturbed by that, as I am by the examples of scientific endeavor that we are forced to do oversees, because of US regulations. THAT is exporting knowlege, in a BAD way.
I live in the Northeast. Our economy is as good as anywhere else in the country.
"Here is my take -- companies of all kinds outside the gubmint sector are going to start finding out that the citizenship requirement is a good thing. H1B guys will eventually go back to their home countries and take corporate "secrets" with them. There is no sense in training your overseas competition just to save a few bucks in the short term."
It's already happening in many ways. I'm the beneficiary of some of it, because some Fortune 500's like to outsource to good ole' American ME! All I hear is "How fast can we bring development back from overseas?"
As to overseas manufacturing, some LARGE INTERNATIONAL corporations are debating whether to continue doing business of any kind in China due to their products being copied. (I'll give you a hint, SIEMENS and ALCATEL).
You ought to adjust that for inflation. Many things (staples) just 30 year ago cost like 1/5th to 1/10th of the dollars they cost now. Cannot use a rubber yardstick to prove a point.
Lead abatement
Asbestos Abatement
Total reframing
Earthquake reinforcement
Fire supression
Reinsulation
Rewiring, top to bottom
Replumbing
etc.
In the long run, it is much cheaper, in many cases, to knock it down and start over, even if the structure is perfectly sound.
Science becomes technology, which becomes consumer "products" and that means jobs.
I find it pathetic that one of our most profitable exports is entertainment -- movies, music, etc.
Thanks. You made my day.
I'm off to work. Take care!
If you do that, don't forget to add dividends back in.
The fact that there is even such a thing as a "video game industry" should tell us a lot about just how rich we are.
As it was with Mike Dukakis in 1988, Bill Clinton in 1992, Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004. And it will be trumped up as a big campaign issue again for either John Edwards or Obama Whateverhisnameis in 2008.
You caught me on the way out. But video games are subject to Moore's Law regarding chips, pricing etc.
Also, this thread is about trends. So, yes, today is okay, but that's no assurance tomorrow will be just as okay.
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