...after 40-plus years of outsourcing, the nation’s industrial engine has rusted away. Trade deficits, especially in advanced technology products since 2001, when China entered the World Trade Organization, signal the return of foreign dependence jeopardizing our defense, innovation, and living standards.
While the U.S. financial sector prospered, China became an industrial superpower, the 21st-century Arsenal of Autocracy.......And now the Asian giant boasts stunning leads in thirty-seven out of forty-four critical and emerging science and technology fields assessed in a new report funded by the U.S. State Department and Special Competitive Studies Project. Its innovation excels in synthetic biology, photonic sensors, advanced batteries, telecommunications, and nanoscale materials and manufacturing. The United States leads only in the remaining seven fields....
Frankly, it wouldn't matter if it were China or Kazakhstan; that's not the point. The point is American working-class prosperity. That has almost totally disappeared. But even more serious:
...With little debate, the best and brightest declared America was moving into a post-industrial age, the way we supposedly transitioned from agriculture to manufacturing, with service sectors trading information and knowledge constituting the acme of achievement. We could therefore ship to the far side of the world messy, blue collar manufacturing jobs, and retain clean, white collar “knowledge workers” who would own the future....
...Dan Wang warns in Foreign Affairs: “Skill loss among not just line workers but also machinists, managers, and product designers…has left the United States in a poor position to dominate emerging technologies.” In other words, shipping the factory floor across an ocean erodes a company’s—and eventually a nation’s—innovation capacity. Inventions cannot be commercialized without an industrial foundation that iterates on product design and process engineering. If manufacturing lands overseas, eventually so does skilled technical talent....
Gee. The American Conservative printed an essay back in 2019 with nearly the exact-same language. You can find the relevant excerpts at my post here.
... Moreover, as our tech geniuses obsessed over post-industrial gimmicks—perfecting attention-grabbing algorithms for social media or inventing the next food-delivery app for the so-called “gig economy”—countries hungry for advancement such as China and India obsessed over production processes delivering technical know-how, the secret sauce of innovation and national strength.
The swath of American-born technologies that migrated elsewhere for advancement boggles the mind. Pisano and Shih point to solar photovoltaic cells, which underpin advanced energy storage, an industry created here but now dominated by Asia. The same pattern applies to ultra-heavy forgings, machine tools, permanent magnets, and rare-earth element refining, as well as rechargeable batteries, LED manufacturing, semiconductors, liquid-crystal displays, precision glass, and fiber-optic components....
Yah, nothing important. Move along.
Or how about doing what Trump would do: tariff the bejabbers out of imports and re-start American industry? Provide middle-class jobs and wages, re-create high-skilled workers, and--as a bonus--stimulate family formation and rebuild defense industries!
Maybe Freddie Stratton and Vinnie Sheily wouldn't approve, but their company is history, ain't it?
Schadenfreude!
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