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 ...
I think we got the good end of that deal. This alarmist piece from the NYTimes is BS.
Bgetter check that theory with the patent office first.
Ah, bemoaning the loss of the subway car industry. And the worldwide demand for them is what? Invest scarce capital in an industry that can measure production by hand if they remove their shoes? I wonder what the author would have written when the buggy whip factory left town?
"Whatever will America do without the buggy whip industry?"
When only China can make weapons, will they take us over?
Exactly.
Agreed. Based on the header, "Goodbye, Production (and Maybe Innovation)," I just knew this was about unions.
Same crap I heard when Reagan was President.......
We manufacture commications equipment - here in the USA. Many of the components come from all over the world.
Big shortage of weapons here eh?
"Tell me about the old days, grandpa."
"Well, things were much different. Our scientists, scholars, and engineers were the best, bar none. Our manufacturing facilities were the envy of the planet. The government made sure everyone had a job. Sure, the stores were empty sometimes and people had to stand in line for things. But they were all made here.""Now run back to the dacha, child. Babu is baking kolachki."
The artist and the label or the CD manufacturer.
Poor analogy. The CD has nothing to do with the creativity of the artist. It is only a way of distributing what is created - it doesn't give the musician a new way to play his instrument.
If we don't train and employ musicians (the guys on the production line), will we produce composers (the inventers)?
Are you saying that Romans were in the same economic system than Spanish? Yet the same general rule applies.
That's lots of wasted opportunity costs up and down the labor chain, not to mention debugging a problem immediately, instead of waiting on everything.
C'mon, man, we're sticking it to the American worker here. THAT'S what's important.
The stealing of intelectual property is going on all the time.
What I was most against all this time was the moving of the means of production abroad, the entire placement of a company's machines and methods brought to an overseas company who never HAD to have any intellectual property to start their business, all they needed was machines with the programming.
To try and restart production in the U.S. on the level of the 1970's to 1980's would require the purchasing of all the material and achines that China bought in the last 20 years.
Who has THAT kind of money?
Who can afford to start up a company, knowing this, when all they need to do is send a drawing file to a Chinese machine shop....who will make it for 1/10 the cost over here, and ship it back cheaper than we can make it, and make a killing on selling that product over here as a commodity.
The last company I did drawings for, sent their drawings to China, who sent back the parts to here, where this company hired all temps to assemble the parts at less than $10 an hour, to then send the parts back to China for final assembly into refrigerators for resale in the U.S.!!
going across the ocean FOUR times to be resold here was still cheaper than being made here!
That's when it started, come to the northeast, you'll see what the results were.
Well it has been going on way before Reagan became President.. Why should I do business in the Northeast where there high taxes????
Nobody expects a company to stay in business if it can't make a profit; why do we expect a man to work for less than it takes to keep him alive and healthy without begging?
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