In the aftermath of the death of Andy Grove, Teresa Tritch at the New York Times revisits his 2010 essay in Bloomberg Businessweek on the need to develop scalable U.S. manufacturing capability—a need that some observers say can be met with smart manufacturing.
As Tritch summarizes, “Mr. Grove contrasted the startup phase of a business, when uses for new technologies are identified, with the scale-up phase, when technology goes from prototype to mass production. Both are important. But only scale-up is an engine for job growth, and scale-up, in general, no longer occurs in the United States.”
She laments that a commitment to U.S. manufacturing is on the agenda of neither Silicon Valley nor U.S. politics. With regard to the latter, Grove wrote, “Our generation has seen the decisive victory of free-market principles over planned economies. So we stick with this belief, largely oblivious to emerging evidence that while free markets beat planned economies, there may be room for a modification that is even better.”
He added that evidence for the benefits of some modification “…stares at us from the performance of several Asian countries in the past few decades. These countries seem to understand that job creation must be the No. 1 objective of state economic policy. The government plays a strategic role in setting the priorities and arraying the forces and organization necessary to achieve this goal. The rapid development of the Asian economies provides numerous illustrations.”
Tritch notes that Grove was writing when U.S. unemployment was 9.7%. “Unemployment has dropped considerably since then, but problems persist,” she writes. “Insecure, low-paying, part-time and dead-end jobs are prevalent. On the campaign trail, large groups of Americans are motivated and manipulated on the basis of real and perceived social and economic inequities.”
And as I wrote recently, politicians can do little but complain about low levels of manufacturing employment. Smart manufacturing is bringing factories back to the U.S., but not many jobs.
