QUO VADIS?

A treasurehouse of commentary has been written to eulogize the death of Steve Jobs, the visionary, innovator, independent thinker and genius. He epitomizes the best in America---the pioneer iconoclast who ignores the conventional wisdom and forages ahead, defying the odds.

In one of the obits, I read an interesting observation: the iPhones and iPads have inscribed on them words to the effect of "Designed in Silicon Valley, California, Made in China". That is an tronic epitaph for our times. We,the great inventors and innovators of the last one hundred years, now send our best ideas to China to be converted into real objects. Fifty years ago, this occurred---but only rarely. Yes, we brought cheap toys and china from Japan and China, but the manufacturing base in America was one of the bulwarks of our society.

How did this happen? Well, start with the maxim that business chases profit: go where you can make it cheaper and maximize your return. My own background is a case in point. My grandfather bought control in 1900 of an underwear manufacturer started the year before in our small town in Ohio. By the middle of the century, we were the largest employer in the town. A partner and I sold the company in the seventies to a midwestern conglomerate,who were excellent accountants and lousy marketers. By the late nineties the business was gone. Now I can put part of the blame on the lack of marketing expertise, but an equal part must be ascribed to the textile business going overseas to Asia.

New England was the original cradle of American textiles; then, in the twenties and thirties, it moved to the south. (We were always an anachronism, being located in the midwest, along with competitiors Jockey and Munsingwear, but the main business had gone south.) In the seventies the trend started to snowball downhill away from the U.S.A.

Another example: the last company I worked for, an Ohio-based manufacturer of jackets who had five manufacturing facilities in Louisiana, was just starting to import from Asia their first jacket when I retired in 1995. Last year, they ceased manufacturing any jackets in America: the last domestic jackers were the wool varsity lettermen's jackets---and they moved to Mexico.

Textiles are not unique in this phenomenon; it has happened in almost every industry in America. The whole clothing industry is long gone. Look at the steel industry. The automobile industry got a shot in the arm from governmental subsidies of two of the Big Three. The foreign competitiors are also manufacturing here for many years, which has helped the economies of the states in which they are located: BMW in Alabama and South Carolina, Toyota in Tennessee, Honda in Ohio, to name a few. The foreign competitors have frequently been the innovators of new ideas in automobiles, although I am delighted to see that American innovation and quality has improved dramatically.

India and China are becoming dominant in manufacturing because of cheap wages, stealing the best ideas, and brilliant engineering. We used to attract the best brains from around the world because of the opportunity for innovative thinking. Now a lot of the Indian and Chinese are staying home.

So, where are we going? Will we continue to become a Service nation and not a Manufacturing nation? Can job stimulus, if politicians can ever agree on anything, start an upward trend toward creativity and new fields of industry? I am not optimistic but faintly hopeful.

Remember the old Chinese adage: may you live in interesting times. Let me say, they are REALLY interesting.