Posted on 08/30/2011 2:24:42 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
THE United States became the world’s largest economy because we invented products and then made them with new processes. With design and fabrication side by side, insights from the factory floor flowed back to the drawing board. Today, our most important task is to restart this virtuous cycle of invention and manufacturing.
Rebuilding our manufacturing capacity requires the demolition of the idea that the United States can thrive on its service sector alone. We need to create at least 20 million jobs in the next decade to offset the effects of the recession and to address our $500 billion trade deficit in manufactured goods. These problems are related, given that service sector accounts for only 20 percent of world trade.
To make our economy grow, sell more goods to the world and replenish the work force, we need to restore manufacturing — not the assembly-line jobs of the past, but the high-tech advanced manufacturing of the future.
Advanced manufacturing relies on the marriage of science and engineering in cutting-edge fields. Cepheid, a company in Sunnyvale, Calif., with a market capitalization of more than $2 billion, designs and manufactures sophisticated instruments that use DNA analysis to detect infectious disease and cancer; its products are used by hospitals for diagnoses and by the Postal Service to screen mail for anthrax.
A young company called Lilliputian Systems has developed handheld chargers for mobile devices. The chargers use a recyclable high-energy butane cartridge to replenish cellphones and laptops more efficiently than wall chargers. The company has a pilot manufacturing plant in Wilmington, Mass., plans to expand its production capacity and uses an Intel component that is also made in Massachusetts.
A decade ago, with help from an Energy Department grant, Yet-Ming Chiang, an M.I.T. professor, made a nanotechnology breakthrough by manipulating lithium battery electrodes.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
For those who want to know, the MIT professor, Yet Min Chiang helped start a company, A123 Systems, that now makes millions of batteries each year for hybrid-electric cars and buses and large-scale energy storage systems. The company recently hired its 1,000th employee. About half the workers at its plant in suburban Detroit were unemployed before A123 Systems came to town.
Like the jet aircraft made by Boeing, one of the country’s largest exporters, products like these require sophisticated manufacturing equipment, operated by skilled workers, and benefit from the tight integration of design and production. With goods like these, the United States can reassert an economic advantage. If we can find ways for companies of every size to exploit the possibilities of nanofabrication, advanced materials, robotics and energy efficiency, we can create networks of innovation, joining lab research to new production processes and business models.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR :
Susan Hockfield, a neuroscientist, is the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a director of General Electric
we will when it becomes economically feasible
taxes and regulations have made the US a bad investment
Is A123 Systems a unionized company?
“America Needs to Start Making Things again.”
We can!
But it wont be huge plants employing a bunch of drones looking to make 30.00/hr + benefits as we had.
It will likely be small shops that emphasize quality and employ a small, tight group of craftspeople that will lead the way.
Agree... soooo who ownes the means of production?
The private sector (the America we new)
or Government (a socialist sh_th_le)
Now, 90% of what you buy is Made in China, it seems.
Yeah, I've been smoking something I guess.
“As we became more connected to China, that poses the question of whether our wages are being set in Beijing,” Rodgers said.
Finding it harder to compete with cheaper manufacturing costs abroad, the U.S. has emerged as primarily a services-producing economy. That trend has created a cultural shift in the job skills American employers are looking for.
Whereas 50 years earlier, there were plenty of blue collar opportunities for workers who had only high school diploma, now employers seek “soft skills” that are typically honed in college.”
http://www.minddump.org/globalization-is-tough-on-unskilled-american
To start manufacturing again, America needs to start exploiting its energy resources. Get over the global warming scam.
Or use robots for automation. Robots don't strike, or call in sick.
“Whereas 50 years earlier, there were plenty of blue collar opportunities for workers who had only high school diploma, now employers seek “soft skills” that are typically honed in college.””
The problem is, the soft skill stuff is even easier to move overseas as the blue collar stuff. I don’t think regs and unions have as much to do with it as how cheap labor is around the world. Until things balance out, which means our standard of living goes down, this kind of economy is how it is.
The US does still manufacture things. This is bogus. If you don’t believe it, look it up.
gtf out of the way of business. otherwise, it’s a pipe dream, and no top-down “initiative” will change that.
the Communist Government has poisoned the WELL so bad nothing can survive their bureaucracy
Look around your house and garage. Do you really need more stuff? If the answer is no, then the premise is wrong.
Typical,New York Times commentator solution to bolster high tech manufacturing jobs. When you wade through the obfuscation, she recommends that the government invests....No wonder she sits on one of Obama’s committees.
If we are looking to retain high tech manufacturing jobs how about a policy that all revenues from products manufactured stateside pursuant to new patents will not be subject to a corporate tax.
“That trend has created a cultural shift in the job skills American employers are looking for.”
Some good blue collar and entry level jobs I held growing up; golf caddy (replaced by carts) gas station attendant (replaced by automation) plastics molder (replaced by computers) steel rule die maker (replaced by automation) tractor blade stamping and deburring (replaced by automation) and assorted other assembly and labor jobs. left a job once because the union moved in and I didn’t like them. Hated and distrusted them.
Dick Cheney was right. America has left me behind. I sit at a computer all day and answer technical questions about machinery and assembly applications. Not bad. Built a good small company, which is getting smaller.
How about 787 dreamliners in Charleston? OOPS, whitehouse says NO!
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