Making
things with your hands is not respectable.
People who manufacture are looked upon as lower middle class at
best. If you truly want to be part of
the cool crowd, go to college, get a degree in engineering and work for a
research company or maybe an architectural firm. You could even design cars for an automotive
company as long as you wear a suit and tie to work. Have fun paying off the school debt.
The United
States middle class is considered to be a shrinking segment of the population
who are, as defined by Google, “the social group between the upper and working
classes, including professional and business workers and their families.”
Stan Shih,
founder of Acer, had a concept called the Stan Shih Smile Curve. He evaluated the various components of a
product cycle in terms of economic value and put together a curve to show the
highest and lowest values added to a particular event. For instance, the romantic virtues including
Conceptualization, Research and Development and Branding all have high added
value. Sales and marketing also have
high value. The lowest added value
events are primarily in manufacturing. Here’s
a reference to a picture of Stan’s smiling curve.
Basically,
the curve tells us that manufacturing a product adds very little value to
it. We’re all about the branding and the
marketing these days. The trouble is, we
seem to have forgotten that if we don’t produce anything, all that grand
inventing and marketing leaves us with nothing to actually sell. Sometimes Gofundme accounts look a lot like
that.
The United
States has seen tremendous invention and some of the greatest marketing
programs in the world. We buy
stuff. We create more stuff to buy. We are innovators. And we make less of it all every single
day. Making it is not just at the lowest
point in the Stan Shih Smile Curve.
Making stuff is not glamorous or cool or even respectable. Since it
doesn’t come up to Middle Class, we send
the manufacturing job overseas to the poor countries where they can pay a
worker a dollar a day to make stuff that we can buy.
The problem
is, if you cut off the manufacturing part of the curve, you are left with a
pair of parentheses ( ) with nothing between them. The cost of manufacturing goes away and comes
back as a wholesale price. The money to
pay for the product left with the manufacturing. There are less people building and making an
income and so less people have money to spend on the fabulous products promoted
by incredible sales campaigns.
We are
creating a closed economy. We’re sending
money overseas to maintain the factories and then we’re paying an overseas
company to sell our produced inventions back to us. The money that would have stayed in our own
economy and been used to buy the products now has to be borrowed from
somewhere, usually through credit cards.
The parentheses are actually more like a drain hole. The money doesn’t come back to us ever. It gets used in other economies.
For most
factory production, it is too late to make a change. We won’t be moving anything back home in the near
future. It certainly would be a good
idea, though, to reconsider exporting any more of our factory work. Of course, that’s another topic. I owe another blog this month anyway.
