A manufacturing economy?

Joel Kotkin sings the praises of manufacturing in today's Wall Street Journal - The Myth of Deindustrialization

It's been a quarter-century since author John Naisbitt blithely described manufacturing as a "declining sport" that Americans could easily offshore to Asia. Since then obituaries for U.S. manufacturing, both mournful and enraged, have been written many times.

The reports of death are premature. Many of the most vibrant economic regions in this country -- from the deep South to the Pacific Northwest -- are still making and transporting real goods. The success of America's "material boys" suggests that the old economy and its blue-collar workers -- so often patronized and pitied -- can still more than hold their own in today's global economy.

It's a nice song -- but Kotkin gets the tune wrong, partly because he doesn't understand the verses. He mistakes blue collar jobs for production jobs, mostly because he equates logistics for manufacturing. He is right to point out that some of our major "industrial" centers are our ports. But that is a service - not production/manufacturing. And part of it is reliant not on US production but all those imports.

This is not to say that his overall thesis isn't correct. The manufacturing success stories he points to are real (expect maybe for the Boeing example where much of the work has been offshored and only the final assembly remains in the US). He is also correct that there are still lots of blue collar jobs in the Intangible Economy. As I've pointed out just last Friday, there a huge number of tangible service jobs that involve the movement of atoms rather than bits. And there are a lot of intangible service jobs that are tied to the movement of atoms (for example, all those engineers and product designers who are part of the "creative class").

But setting it up as a blue-collar/white collar - old economy/new economy - working class/creative class clash is just picking a fight where there really isn't any. Kotkin's article is just one more example of how our old industrial era mindset hampers our understanding of what is really going on, however inadvertently.