Dr. Reich:

Idle hands are the devil's workshop.

If you believe that the American workforce is somehow going to move to an abstract working world while the rest of the world supplies us cheap goods, then you are deluded, stupid, and insane. We are not Hoynhims, and the third world are not Yahoos.

All you are interested in is crafting a piece of pseudointellectual legedermain to distract the labor union from the knife in its back.

What it's really about, Flower, is value-additive work. What can we do that improves the value of something?

Analysis by its nature is not value-additive. A certain amount of it is necessary, true, and yet we can't all sit around and analyze everything - because we don't live in the University of the United States.

Some of the first things we might look at are high speed intercity and commuter rail lines. The construction of them can not be "outsourced", as a rail line is built between the points it serves. It makes equally little sense to outsource the rolling stock manufacture, as rail cars cost more to ship than is saved by outsourcing them overseas. Urban buses as well - for the same reasons, and both rail and buses need operation and maintenance once they're running.

American companies also do very well overseas, although that tends to benefit investors far more than workers, as the jobs are created offshore.

Another sector where we need to put in serious effort is energy technology. Why should Vestas get all the wind turbine money? And again, we can't outsource rebuilding the grid in new and more robust and decentralized ways - it's a physical plant improvement that is done in place.

Just a bit o' food for thought.

Dear Doctor Reich-Rock,
Theoretically I will have a futuristic job thinking, not tinkering. What does that pay? I mean, I’m 62 and a little old for reframing. I once tried to manufacture evidence against your way of creating arguments, but like my 401K and my union, it disappeared into thin air. I had nothing left but the residue on my real forehead. And despite intellectually fiddling with my red hot ‘96 Saturn, the car demands hands on experience to be fixed.

If I could somehow link my intentions with the engine, perhaps it might tell me “why US taxpayers would want to own today’s GM.” And the engine would say: THE WELFARE OF THE PEOPLE COMES FIRST, theoretically. But then, cars don’t really talk, do they. During depressions, they just sit in the driveway, contemplating bankruptcy and the loss of drivers and the price of oil and global warming. I wanna be a new green electric truck. Is that symbolically or analytically a prospect?

Realistically Sincere, stratofrog

Once upon a time, American industrialists realized that union wages (for which they'd run union members through rigorous gauntlets, by the way) and niceties like environmental regulations were cutting into their exorbitant profits, so they shipped their factories off to places like China and Mexico, where workers, should they chafe at dime-a-day pay, are fired and replaced in a snap. And pollution? Schmolution!

In a few years, when we're in rags and eating bark off trees, factories will come back, and we'll be damn glad to be chained to our machine tools and lose a hand in unregulated sweatshops just for a scrap of bread.

Well... that's then. Until that day, we'll shuffle paper to each other, and the government will borrow more money to pay us. We'll live the phantom paradise of a "service economy" until some genius finally discovers there's nothing left to serve. Through it all, brilliant economists will tell us, over and over, that we're living the inevitability of the global economy. We know they're brilliant because brilliant writers working for brilliant media barons tell us so.

We shop for trousers of Kleenex at Target, and eat generic slop. It's all global, baby. Can't hold it back.

Our betters tell us so.

EGGZATLY!!! The analytic jobs are already going over seas. The Chinese are learning english and the Indians are learning the American accent. Eitehr way, if these is any way for the job to go overseas, it will.

It's not that we do not build anything, it is that we will not build anything until we can degrade wages to the point that the shipping costs render the import too expensive, or we resume tariffs, which protected us for decades, and which are prevelant around the world, prety much everywhere else but here.

Why no tariffs here? Because our politicians are not patriots, but globalists. They cater to international intrests who seek to sell thier goods to the US, but who have no fouled the market. Now that our economy is in ruins the best we can hope for is parity with the rest of the world.

Great post, FC.

What a lot of twaddle by all contributors to this essay.

Dr. Reich was largely responsible for one of the greatest growth spurts in American history, so it's unlikely that the breathtakingly over-simplified "ideas" presented on this page haven't occurred to him.

American industrial capacity has taken a hit, but so has that of most of the countries in the world. We no longer produce much in the way of consumer goods, and much of our steel-making capacity went away a generation ago, but there are not many countries in the world that can compare with the United States for the manufacture of industrial machinery, airplanes, and the like.

The kinds of jobs that depend on blue-collar labor are vanishing and will continue to do so all over the world. That's just the way it is. Good or bad has nothing to do with it. Right or wrong has nothing to do with it. As the Zen Yankee says, "It is as is and ain't no iser."

Moan all you want. But train your kid to be a steel worker, a garment worker, or a car maker and you're pissing away her or his future.

So what's your solution? If we're out of cheap energy, how do we power the big plants that employ the blue-collar guys? It seems to me that Reich is telling us that big industry IS the last war in the US, and that intellectual pursuits are the way to go.

Big industry is closing down in the US, but the fastest growing industrial nations are like Uzbekistan and Vietnam -- growing fast because the denominator in their rates are so low, not because the enumerator is high.

Forget all about making jeans and cars. Those kinds of jobs are being performed by machines, and that trend will do nothing but increase. Learn to program the machines, or be a plumber or an electrician.

While I certainly support maintaining manufacturing and manufacturing jobs in this country, the argument is a distraction from a bigger problem.

You don't think they're outsourcing abroad or importing workers from abroad to fill jobs that require a B.A., M.S., PhD, MD?

Have our Democrats in Congress protected us against these visa scams? Is it easier to get a Democrat to support increasing the budget for higher education in this country or to support increasing the number of visas for the foreign educated who will work cheaper?

There is a war on the American middle class and we have no National Guard or Reserves to fight it and we sure don't have a political party to fight it.

I think that one of the biggest issues is our trade policy. Free trade has been nothing of the sort for American labor. While both capital and labor are moved freely across international boarders the productive output resulting from such movement is not so free to move. Many of our largest trading partners still impose tariffs and otherwise protect their domestic markets while maximally exploiting ours. American capitalists relocated domestic manufacturing abroad, not for the purpose of expanding capacity to meet growth in foreign demand, but rather to export products for sale back in to U.S. markets. Those same interests also lobbied the U.S. government (the true problem) to further open domestic U.S. markets to the products of such "outsourcing". The result has been NAFTA, China MFN trade status, both signed by Bill Clinton, among other culprit governmental actions. The reason for this, of course, was because it allowed capitalists to pocket more profit by bypassing U.S. wage rates and U.S. economic infrastructure(i.e., transportation systems, power and water distribution, law enforcement and courts, stable government and military) support costs, those very things which have made U.S. domestic consumer markets so desirable. It is no accident that free trade has not equalled fair trade for the American worker and small business.

It seem to me that the key to future American employment and wage growth lay in correcting trade policy unfairness, along with solid international intellectual property protection. Without such trade corrections and 'idea' protections any significant new U.S. created industries (i.e., green energy) would soon be outsourced as well. Those economic incentives to outsourcing American production that are rooted in unfair trade policy have to be removed. The international financial system is so intertwined, however, that it would be short-term risky for the U.S. government to press for an equitable treatment of international trade barriers. Particularly since we now owe so much of our national ass, in the form of T-bills, to many of the foreign interests whom we need to so press.

BTW, so called "knowledge" jobs will not fix the outlook for Americans as information technology has made such jobs the least costly to outsource. With no physical plant to move or construct, along with excellent foreign technical Universities, especially in India and China, essentially all that's physically needed is a desk, a PC, and Internet access.