Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

We have chased manufacturing out of America. We now have holes in our job structure and have lost the ability to adapt to a changing world.

I read a few posts on the “Econolypse” lately. Here is one post, and here is another.

We have chased the manufacturing jobs from the U.S. Some of this is from government regulations (I think that most of it is from government regulations, but that is just me), while some of it is from companies seeking to find less expensive ways to make good products for the American consumer. Governments in developing countries welcome American manufacturing jobs. The result is to build a factory in Cambodia. The product has the same quality at lower costs. The American consumer is pretty happy.

We have lost a few layers of our economy: These jobs that we lost to other countries,

they weren’t good jobs

How many times have you heard that one? Who wants to work on an assembly line all day that produces over-priced sneakers? That is a lousy job. Good riddance. Let those guys in Cambodia do that.

I’ll do something creative and fun and make lots of money

How many times have you your that one? Our highly educated masses of Generation Y (or whatever we call that big group of people born in the 1980s) will create, create, and create some more. They’ll make fun apps for our smart phones, produce entertaining videos for YouTube, and some other fun things that one day will pay them handsomely (just in time for us baby boomers to retire and be supported by all this new wealth).

So now we have a hole in our economy: Funny thing about all those fun and creative jobs – they haven’t shown up yet.

An economy is like a portfolio: Perhaps portfolio is not a good word for this, but consider a group of anything you have.  You can rank all the things you own by cost. You can rank all the things you own by how essential they are. You can rank all the things you own by all sorts of rank-ness.

Note the resemblance – no matter how you rank things, you have a spread across a spectrum.  You cannot label everything you own as essential or everything you own as frivolous. It just doesn’t work that way and it never has.

This is a property we learn from General Systems Thinking. If we optimize, e.g., we only own essentials, we lose the ability to adapt. By owning a few frivolous items, we learn something new. If an unforeseen future becomes a reality, some of the frivolous items are now essential and we can adapt because we already have them.

The world economy today is not predictable. I don’t think it was ever predictable. Hence, the ability to adapt to something new and unexpected is a good property. To optimize an entire economy for adaptability means that we don’t optimize for any one thing. We have a spectrum of industries and businesses and jobs and such. That means we have people who know how to make things on an assembly line as well as people who can create the next YouTube.

Perhaps we should bring back those things that we knew we would never need again. Things like manufacturing jobs. The trouble is, those jobs sometimes require big, dirty, energy-inefficient factories. And I’m not sure that we can tolerate those things anymore. Perhaps we have only forgotten how to see their value. We can re-learn.