The Tinkerers by Alec Foege

Author:Alec Foege
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2012-11-15T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

WHEN TINKERING VEERS OFF COURSE

THE BRITISH SCIENCE WRITER MATT RIDLEY famously and provocatively wrote in 2010 that “for culture to turn cumulative, ideas need to meet and mate,” and that in our current networked culture, “ideas are having sex with each other more promiscuously than ever.”

If that’s the case, then the financial shenanigans that precipitated the economic downturn were a veritable orgy. In retrospect, many observers of American culture argued that perhaps ours was a nation that was getting too clever for its own good. If the best we could do as a society was to construct highly leveraged investment instruments of mass destruction, then maybe we shouldn’t try our best.

One of the undercurrents that accompanied the financial crisis of 2008 was a sense that our reliance on complicated financial products that even the experts didn’t fully understand reflected how far we’d gotten away from our traditional strength as an industrialized nation: manufacturing. Instead of tinkering with tools and machines with the purpose of making things, we’d become obsessed with making money at the cost of the nation’s future well-being.

From the earliest days of his first term, President Obama made speeches that enhanced this narrative. “One of the changes I’d like to see is once again our best and brightest commit themselves to making things,” he announced to students at Georgetown University in June 2009.

His comments took an increasingly populist tone by evoking a rosy past when manufacturing fueled the economy and condemning the widespread practice of importing foreign goods more affordable than anything American made. “America is still home to the most creative and most innovative businesses in the world,” President Obama told employees at a century-old General Electric turbine plant in Schenectady, New York. “We’ve got the most productive workers in the world. America is home to inventors and dreamers and builders and creators. All of you represent people who each and every day are pioneering the technologies and discoveries that not only improve our lives, but they drive our economy.”

No controversy there. But what followed took on a decidedly defensive tone. “Folks were selling a lot to us from all over the world. We’ve got to reverse that. We want an economy that’s fueled by what we invent and what we build. We’re going back to Thomas Edison’s principles. We’re going to build stuff and invent stuff.” And, reinforcing the notion that the nation was once better and more productive than it is now, President Obama added, “I want plants like this all across America.”

Obama’s inspired words, many would argue, were exactly what unmoored American workers needed to hear. Except for the fact that such inspiring talk was overly simplistic and at worst delusional, as Geoff Colvin of Fortune convincingly argued in a September 2011 column. Truth is, US manufacturing actually grew dramatically over the past decade and the value of the resultant products increased in value. The unfortunate truth is that the more sophisticated manufacturing becomes, the fewer workers it needs to increase productivity.

It’s logical to conclude from this that manufacturing may not be the best place to find the jobs of the future.

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