In high-tech materials, the United States is now similarly dependent on imports. And in crucial new components such as laser diodes and liquid crystal displays, the country was never a contender in the first place. Because, conventional wisdom to the contrary, advanced manufacturing offers fundamental advantages over post-industrial services in building a rich and powerful economy. Manufacturing's most obvious advantage is that it creates an excellent range of jobs. Whereas post-industrial businesses like software and financial services tend to recruit mainly from the cream of the intellectual crop, manufacturing harnesses the skills of everyone from ordinary factory hands to the most brilliant scientists and the most capable managers.
Manufacturers also score over information businesses in their export prowess.
That's because, for one thing, manufacturers usually avoid the piracy problems that so drastically reduce American information businesses' receipts from abroad. Whereas a typical information product may have to be adapted for different languages and customs in different markets around the world, a typical manufactured product requires little if any adaptation. In many cases, information businesses don't find it worthwhile to adapt their products for foreign markets, and even where they do, they tend to have the adaptation done abroad, thus generating costs that cut deeply into the net revenues remitted to the United States. Not only does the large amount of capital required for the enterprise offer workers protection against competition from cheap labor, it can also powerfully boost worker productivity. A good example is the contribution that expensive robots make in enabling Japanese auto workers to achieve the world's highest productivity levels.