Vaclav Smil - Made in the USA: The Rise and Retreat of American Manufacturing

Preface

Long experience has taught me that too many people approach books dealing with complex topics with too many preconceptions and hence become easily disappointed if the content does not reflect at least some of them. I am afraid that a book about the rise and retreat of American manufacturing written at the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century will be particularly subject to such a reception. Those economists (and policy makers) who do not see (as was famously said) any difference between potato chips and microchips, who favor unrestricted globalization, and who celebrate the loss of US manufacturing jobs as a desirable evolutionary step toward a purely service economy will dislike the books insistence that manufacturing does matter. Equally, those economists (and policy makers) who abhor every aspect of globalization and argue for increased protectionism will dislike my strong agreement with the calls for greatly expanding US exports of manufactured goods.

If this is not an economic analysis written by an economist promoting a particular view or advocating a specific policy, it is also not a history of Americas technical prowess written by a historian trying to conform to a distinct paradigm. I am a scientist with a lifelong devotion to interdisciplinary studies, and I have published many books on complex technical, historical, and economic topics, but when writing this book my goal was quite simple: to tell a story, though one that is well documented and thoroughly referenced. That story is truly epic, multifaceted, and, to me, also endlessly fascinating. There are many reasons why the United States came to hold such an exceptional position in the world, but manufacturing does not usually come first to mind. This book explains why and how manufacturing became such a fundamental force in creating and advancing the United States economic, strategic, and social might. It traces manufacturings rapid rise during the last decades of the nineteenth century, its consolidation and modernization during the preWorld War II decades, its role in enabling the worlds first mass consumption society after 1945, and its post-1974 challenges and most recent reversals of fortune.

How does the story end? Well, it does not; it keeps unfoldingand even a relatively near-term outcome of this process is beyond our ken. That is why I am content neither to offer general policy recommendations for creating optimal conditions for manufacturings growth nor to advance strong arguments for specific changes aimed at preventing its decline. Washington, DC, has no shortage of special-interest organizations and think tanks to do that (and some have done so in a thoughtful and comprehensive manner). What I will doconvinced that no advanced modern economy can truly prosper without a strong, diverse, and innovating manufacturing sector whose aim is not only affordable, high-quality output but also to provide jobs for more than a minuscule share of the working populationis review some of the recent calls for change made by those concerned about the future of US manufacturing and explain in some detail some of their principal recommendations.

Fundamentally, this is a story about the countrys past achievements and its more recent failings, and, as always in my books, I will not make any forecasts; hence I will not answer the question of whether American manufacturing will experience a true renaissance, as its dwindling proponents hope, or whether it will, in employment terms if not in total output value, become an ever more marginal economic sector (as many economists belonging to the serving potato chips is as good as making microchips school equanimously anticipate). All I can say is that I see the odds of Americas true manufacturing renaissance and the sectors further retreat to be no better than even.