Gulf oil spill exposes our loss of American ingenuity
Thursday, 08 July 2010 15:16
BY KAREN BOROFF
COMMENTARY
Plug the damn hole! Months into the BP deep water rig explosion, Americans are still wondering why this thing can't be fixed. Let me put aside, although not because these arguments are unimportant, perceived and perhaps actual failures of leadership, within both BP and the US government. I would posit that the inability to respond quickly and effectively to this spill has its roots in the loss of the manufacturing base in the United States.
"American ingenuity" used to be a buzzword. Generations of American tinkerers — people making things, no matter the scale — created an aptitude to think about how things worked. Gears, pumps, molds, engines, castings, metallurgy, lathing, tool and die — the roster was quite long. Whether it was a homeowner who pieced together cast-off wire and a motor to complete a home repair or a telegraph operator who would be transformed into a Thomas Edison, Americans naturally and regularly thought about how to make or build or fix or improve things. Women worked with sewing machines, children played with erector sets and everyone knew that oiling one's bike was a good thing. Whether one had formal training as an engineer or not, one had a know-how and an ease with machines and manufacturing. It was in one's DNA, and a dominant gene at that, which, since the 1970s, has gone recessive.
Not only was the intellectual capital on manufacturing in abundance in America, so too were the machine shops and the raw materials readily available to execute one's ideas. Schools had machining tools, homes had workshops, and factories abounded. The supply chain of vendors in the production of goods resulted in thousands of minds thinking about creating and improving manufacturing. The environment supported one's work. And a manufacturing mentality also created a sense of urgency about making repairs quickly. If the assembly line was down, that was lost money so speed was of the essence to put things right. A broken plow? — get it fixed quickly or the planting season would be lost. We all remember the scene from the movie Apollo 13, where the team on the ground had to create a fix with only the material available on the damaged spaceship and to do so in a few hours. Whether we realized it or not, a manufacturing mentality, not a regulatory one, made us more nimble and more responsive to correct downtime — to plug the damn leak!
It may not be of the ilk of all politicians to think about the long term lessons that will come about from our reflection on and retrospective of the BP mess. But, I hope that at least a few will give thought to how to restart and foster our nation's manufacturing industry, whether it is for clean energy or motors or windows or household goods. The unintended but nonetheless positive outcomes that hail from a manufacturing mentality would have done us well now and can do so for the future.
Karen Boroff is a professor and Dean Emeritus at Seton Hall University's Stillman School of Business.
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