Curious Cat Management Improvement: Manufacturing and the Economy

Curious Cat Management Improvement: Manufacturing and the Economy

Curious Cat cites data indicating that U.S. manufacturing value added increased by 39 percent from 1990 to 2001, as compared with 22 percent for world manufacturing value added.

I think that other countries were able to displace U.S. manufacturers in labor intensive industries, but that the United States was able to maintain a lead in knowledge intensive manufacturing.

This is good for the economy as a whole, but hard on the people, towns and regions in the United States that lived on labor intensive manufacturing, and didn't have the educational or skill resources to move from the labor intensive jobs that they had lost into the knowledge intensive jobs that were being created.

To prepare for a still more knowledge intensive economy of the future, we will have to do a better job educating our people, and we will have to be sure that the economy promotes and supports high levels of innovation. Unfortunately, that also implies that we will have to allow high rates of "creative destruction"; there will be short term losers.

I hope we can also maintain policies that keep those losses to the short term, and support people as they recover from the ill effects of the destruction (no matter how "creative").