Bulldozers - the 'essence' of world power
A friend forwarded me
this NYTimes article by Louis Uchitelle on the exodus of manufacturing jobs from the United States. Uchitelle finds this quite alarming, because, he says:
...the essence of a great world power is its edge in producing not services but manufactured products that other people want — Boeing's airliners, for example, Intel's semiconductors and Caterpillar's earth-moving equipment. To the extent this output passes to foreign manufacturers, or even to Americans operating abroad, we lose the means to buy what we, in turn, want from others."
Say what? First of all, manufactured goods are a declining fraction of the developed world's consumption. Once we've met our material needs, we spend more and more on services. What makes Uchitelle so sure that we won't be able to provide our services in exchange for goods made elsewhere?
More fundamentally, I think the 'essence of a great world power', if such a thing truly exists (but at any rate, as it relates to the 'essence' of the US as a world power), is the environment that enables us to continuously innovate and create the most complex products man has ever made - new pharmaceuticals, new computer chips, new software, etc. I am truly at a loss to understand why manufacturing bulldozers is really so vitally important.
Posted by Stephen Bronstein at August 18, 2003 10:55 PM