THERE IS A CONCEIT AMONG THE MANAGEMENT CLASS — particularly members of that class who style themselves as left-of-center — that if we just send millions of former workers from our devastated manufacturing sector to college so they can become website designers or something, that will make up for destroying the industries that formerly provided them a decent living.
We can’t be a first-tier economy by selling each other life insurance and software; we need to make things — physical, need-machine-tools-to-make-them things like cars, boats, clothing, machine tools and electronics. The Democratic Party’s leadership used to know this, and acted accordingly, with all kinds of support for (real, actual) industry and its (real, actual) workers. These days, however, Democrats seem to represent members of the management class who want to send line workers and other people whose aptitudes are more mechanical and practical than intellectual to college so they can become computer programmers or something. It’s ridiculous.
If you use any reasonable proxy for the absolute maximum percentage of Americans that can possibly get a college degree — making unrealistic assumptions about pervasive tutoring, SAT prep, and so on — the number is not much above 50%, and the more realistic number is somewhere around 35%.
The vast majority of Americans who will never get a college degree includes millions of ex-manufacturing workers who used to make a good living by making things here in the U.S. For decades, the economy offered them a way to use their skills and gifts and afford the basics of life, plus a little fun. It is increasingly the case that our economic system has no real place for them. Those with less than a college degree have precious few ways to support a family in anything approaching comfort. And even these avenues are vanishing.
Are they to be consigned to working at 7/11 and making $9 an hour for the rest of their lives? Don’t we as citizens have an obligation to see that they have something better to aspire to — work that allows them to support their families in a dignified way, and maybe even to put something away for college for the kids and themselves in their golden years?
These questions have not been asked of Americans in any public and consistent way for years — decades, even. The very phrase, “we, as citizens, are obligated to …” is, in the libertarian, Hobbesian world of economic mercilessness we’ve allowed to flourish, a nonsensical phrase full of meaningless words.
If we want a different future, we must address the needs of our non-white-collar workers to find meaningful and rewarding work. For that, I would argue that we need an official industrial policy. The U.S. is the only so-called “First World” nation without one, and it shows.
We could use Germany as a model of how this might work. Germany is famously one of the premier sources of high-quality goods of every sort — cars, clocks, precision instruments, electronics, cameras and other optical equipment, and so on. A big reason is that the German people have decided that they want an economy that produces those things, and has taken specific actions through their government to achieve that goal:
- They invest lots of public money in training a highly educated work force. And “education” doesn’t necessarily mean college — while the German higher education system is excellent, they also place a far greater emphasis on vocational training than the United States does. Most of the people who actually build BMW cars in Germany’s factories do not need a college education to do so, but they do need familiarity with precision, computerized machinery, plus deep and detailed training in various materials-handling skills, and so on.
- That highly educated work force designs and makes high-end products for high wages, because education (again, in the broader sense — not just college) makes workers more valuable. It then exports those high-quality products at high prices.
Germany is the second (CORRECTION: third) biggest exporter in the world despite having slightly less than a third of America’s population and only about 7 percent of the largest exporter, China — while having some of the best-paid workers in the world. German auto workers, for example, make almost twice what America’s workers make.
We could transform our economic structures into something that would make Ayn Rand smile up wanly from Hell, and still not beat the cheaper parts of the world on cost. Germany has avoided going down America’s road toward middle class ruin by investing public resources in training their workforce and in research.
Such an approach is possible in the United States, but to get there, we as citizens must realize — more than that, we must decide, and then act on the decision — that, to coin a phrase, the economy is made by and for us, and not us for the economy.