What ‘Experts’ Get Wrong About U.S. Manufacturing

Pundits have a limited but powerful influence on a business organism

Manufacturing in the United States isn’t healing as fast as we’d like or as quickly as we deserve. On that, most of us can agree. But it sure seems like we’re seeing a steady stream of misguided understanding among much of the economic and academic elite. They often seem to miss what a strong manufacturing base really means to us. Or any country, for that matter.

Recently, a young man named Brian Jencunas wrote a piece titled, “Trying to Revive American Manufacturing Is a Fool’s Errand.” It is a perfect example of this lack of awareness of the values of a well-managed, inclusive industrial base.

It—and articles like it—make me wanna throw a baby turtle in a blender.

Now, I don’t mean to pick on or discourage Brian. He’s young—a college senior, his bio says. He’s learning. I’ll bet he’s a fine young man. But his article is the most recent in a line of similar tripe. They all deserve to be called out. So I’m using this one. Sorry, Brian. Nothing personal.

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Comments

When commentators talk up

When commentators talk up 'new economy' ideas: that is we will be a serivce industry/middle manager economy, there seems to be disregrad for the infrastructure of such an economy. Who is going to invent and manufacture the PCs we use, the switches and controllers for the internet; the better computing, the improved switches and controllers? And the better this gear is the more efficient will be our software, and one hopes, our productivity. Service industries ride on the back of high technology manufacturing and social progress has always called on the resources of manufacturing industry to make the environment more managable and tractable (I mean environment in the broadest possible sense).

The original five points?

You lost me a little there AJ - I'll take another look at it later but I was intrigued by the propsect of dissecting the five original bullets at the start of the article but at the end it seemed like you diverged and really only covered two of the four points. I think we could have a lot more fun with this.