Manufacture or perish

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.tampabay.com/opinion/columns/manufacture-or-perish/1199719

Manufacture or perish
By Harold Meyerson, Washington Post
In Print: Thursday, November 3, 2011

Is innovation enough? Is cultivating America's inventive genius the way we can restore our economic leadership?

The outpouring of grief over the death of Steve Jobs has raised the presumably redemptive power of innovation to understandable, if unsustainable, heights among many within the commentariat (and many outside it). But innovation alone won't reverse our economic decline. Indeed, without U.S. manufacturing, we're likely to lose U.S. innovation, too.

Such a notion doesn't seem to have occurred to Walter Isaacson, whose highly readable biography of Jobs was released last month. It is America's ability to produce the occasional Steve Jobs, Isaacson believes, that gives us our edge. "China and India are likely to produce many rigorous analytical thinkers and knowledgeable technologists," he wrote in the New York Times. "But smart and educated people don't always spawn innovation. America's advantage, if it continues to have one, will be that it can produce people who are also more creative and imaginative, those who know how to stand at the intersection of the humanities and the sciences." snip

I recently interviewed one of Jobs' mentors, Andy Grove, the legendary founding director of engineering and later chief executive of Intel. One problem with the U.S. economy, Grove said, "is the hysterical love that we lavish on innovation. We never talked about it at my job — innovation was followed by production in the same factories where we innovated." Grove is a strong proponent of returning production to the United States — if necessary, through tariffs.

[moondust]

1. Gadgetopia!

What we really need is more gadgets!

:eyes:

[county worker]

2. Manufacturing creates more value than the value of input used to create it.

Manufacturing takes material, labor and overhead and combines it so that the items created are worth more than the material, labor and overhead used to create them (so long as there is an efficient manufacturing process.)

The jobs that manufacturing creates in obtaining the material, labor and overhead are spread out over the supply chain. The end product of manufacturing is sold and resold creating even more turnover of money.

Manufacturing grows the economy by creating jobs and multiple instances of the turning over of money from one individual or organization to another.

Wall street does none of this.

[badtoworse]

3. Where do you think businesses that do that get financing?

[county worker]

4. It depends, it could be personal capital or local banks. Most manufacturing is small business.

That does not change the fact that Wall Street does not create anything of value other than wealth for itself.

[Romulox]

5. If "US manufacturing" means Hyundais assembled at $10/hour (no bennies!) in Alabammy,

then no.