Manufacturing is and will remain the central economic activity in world trade. New Age gurus take deserved hard hits. In Praise of Hard Industries is a good contrarian read for policymakers, managers, and anyone interested in a different view of both the U.S. and Japanese economies. Earlier this month, President Clinton crowed about the nation's steady economic growth over the last eight years. He told Nightly Business Report on PBS that a few consecutive quarters of low unemployment used to lead automatically to inflation.
Economic success continues to flow to nations with advanced manufacturing bases.
And what looks like a sustained boom for information-based economies will in the end turn out to have been a mirage.