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.
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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."
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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 ...
And we gripe when the Asian producers, particularly in China, copy our technology and designs, and send us cheap knock-off imitations...
Guess where they got the information on how to make those things...duh, we hired them to produce them in the first place. Give a professional burglar your house plans with all your valuable secrets marked plus the key to the front door and walk away, don't complain that your house is cleaned out when you return...
You are too modest.
"They are imported now, and the skills required to make them are disappearing in the United States."
BS. Americans can't weld and turn bolts? Freakin' NYT alarmist BS article.
I'm sorry you have trouble making a living. My people are doing great. But then again, we do stuff about it other than complain on FR.
Having three DVD players and plasma screen?
Solutions please.
I, on the other hand, am so ignorant, I don't even know what an "AI program" is.
It haunts me to think I may unknowingly be one.
Yes, he is part of an AI program. It was designed by Americans, but built in India.
Making my point that isn't the CD manufacturer making 10 cents on the CD pressing making the money.
P.S. I simply wrote my reply in the same manor as you wrote yours.
Minor point that is glossed over here - you can make something without having to make it in high volume production which incurs huge startup costs and high risk.
Yup, I got problems with the the undemocratic principles of the "closed shop", too.
What really gets me is when public-sector unions go on strike, basically holding the ENTIRE INNOCENT PUBLIC hostage in their quest to satify their selfish demands (transit strikes, teacher strikes, etc.)
Actaully I was "built" in Texas.
This is a silly argument.
Designing things and making them are two different issues entirely. Furthermore, when designing things, there are perhaps two or three people that actually have the skills to do it in any particular company. It's not like if a refrig is made in brazil that the entire USA can't made a fridge now. There will ALWAYS be people in the USA that will be able to make anything. Their salary will simply rise if there is brain drain.
Artificial Intelligence (intelligence simulated by a machine).
Well, yes, that Americans "make too much" relative to cheap foreign labor is a very real issue, whether certain types of folk want to admit that or not. Unions tend to exacerbate labor expenses, which makes them a key component of the problem.
Common. By any economic measure we are wealther now than ever before in history.
L
This little device with all the creative accessories and the web based download system coupled with great marketing and imaging has produced phenomenal results for an American Company that manufacturers nothing in the USA.
One can say that this will eventually be copied, but look at Microsoft, one of the world's wealthiest companies with arguably the best distribution on earth cannot come up with a device to compete.
The challenge that Apple has is continuing to innovate.
It can and will be done right here in the good ol USA.
Do you mean like china where there are no freedoms?
How much of American manfacturing do you think was unionized before we swallowed the free trade pill?
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