The Importance of Manufacturing
The New York Times recently published an article highlighting the importance of manufacturing to the United States. It focused on the recent governmental encouragement of the U.S. battery manufacturing industry, noting that targeted government support of that kind was not common in previous years. Yet governments in other countries, namely China, Japan, and Korea, highly value manufacturing and have provided aid accordingly. Governments in these countries recognize that the “it” industries of today, mainly information companies, wield great power but offer minimal jobs. Manufacturing, on the other hand, has an extremely large value chain and is a huge generator of jobs, yet is not regarded highly by many in this country.
But it should be.
When a country loses manufacturing, it often loses the R&D that goes along with it. And with the loss of R&D, that country is less likely to be able to support and manufacture any new technologies that arise.
The author identifies a need for the U.S. to “aspire to a different business model than the one we have come to admire,” and, quite appropriately to the ACP, the last sentence of the article states that the business model should look “less like Google and more like Ford.”
Click the link below to read the full article.
Does America Need Manufacturing - Article by Jon Gertner, published in The New York Times, August 24, 2011.
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