> The US followed the advice of the business schools long ago and outsourced all its core competencies.
Bashing metal and low-tech widget-forming has never really been a core competency of the US. It was useful to keep people employed for a 50 years or so but for the past century the US seems to have aimed for technological synthesis and increasingly high-tech production as a core strength.
> The US' loss of technical and manufacturing expertise is going to be extremely hard to reverse, and reversing it is going to require a rejection of financial capitalist economic ideology and things like "maximizing shareholder value" as the prime directive.
It is unnecessary to reverse something which was not lost in the first place. As others have repeatedly pointed out all over the comments on this article the US has continued to climb up the manufacturing food chain and dominates the top-end. It may employ fewer people, but the productivity and economic benefit of the US manufacturing sector has simply not declined at all and therefore no 'rejection of financial capitalist economic ideology' will be required.
Unfortunately wanting something to be true, and it actually being true are not the same thing.
Even if a whole bunch of your peers say the same thing, it still doesn’t make it true.
I’m not really sure what to say... please go and do some actual research on this topic.
For many years, I have observed that folks in the Bay Area (if I might use that as the shorthand for those at the "top-end" of the technical food chain) tend to dismiss and deride the work further down the food chain, whether that work is "bashing metal" or piecing together business applications.
There are two truths I believe about this work that some do not acknowledge:
1. People who bash metal or piece together business applications have expertise and knowledge that folks higher up the food chain do not have.
Most people who make their living high up the food chain did it by proving they could rise up above those further down the food chain, so it makes sense to believe that this work is beneath them. But the domains are different, and the choice to live high up the food chain necessarily means that one chooses to miss out on experiences and knowledge that those further down the food chain will have.
2. The folks higher up the technical food chain are dependent on those lower on the food chain.
If I might pick up an imperfect analogy: Sharks are higher up the food chain than fish. Fish get bossed around by sharks. But sharks are dependent on fish to survive, not the other way around.
If you think the far east only dominates low-tech widget forming, you should look into where the iPhone and Macbook are manufactured :)
I also know that the iPhone and Macbook are not particularly difficult pieces of engineering and that the tech required to make the shiny bit of tech you see in the store is the bit of the iceberg beneath the waterline that represents a lot of the value in what we are talking about.
If we want to trade vaguely related aphorisms: “Amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics.” The tip of the spear is less impressive than the logistical tail that makes it possible.