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To: Rarebird who wrote (77979)	7/27/2003 12:17:15 PM
From: AllansAlias	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 209892

Thanks for stopping by Rarebird for your quarterly post. I love the sawing metaphor. Folks are cavalier about the loss of blue collar jobs. Is there a wishful/misguided assumption that these people will become workers in the new economy. It takes one helluva lot of call-centre jobs to support the coming tidal wave of pensioners, while simultaneously policing the world and growing the civil service. Perhaps people are using post-WWII as their template. After WWII, New York went from being the historical manufacturing plant of America to, well, no manufacturing to speak of. Now, it did make the transition, but it was uniquely situated to do so, since it was also the financial and media center of America. The American center of gravity changed after the war, moving substantially more toward the south and west, and for a time, things were ticking along nicely for this next phase of American expansion. The citizens went to California, Arizona, and Florida, but the capital only paused there for a short time and then continued the journey south and west; notably to Asia. What could plausibly lead the next American economic revival? When it comes to nuts and bolts consumer products, the low end has been ceded to China and a few others. In the middle-tier, it was ceded to Japan. In the upper-tier, notably autos, it was ceded to Japan and Europe. One has to ask oneself what America does well anymore that has a high-barrier to entry. Software/IT jobs ain't it. In the 1997 census, the great bulk of the people were categorized as either service or retail trade: 57 million or so. The next category was manufacturing, at around 19 million people. We all know that the US is an enormous service economy. According to 2003 BLS #'s, of some 130 million workers, 108 work in services. That boggles my mind. I don't know if common sense applies, but one would think that there would have to be some economically local (i.e., US) component underpinning this service economy. 14 to 15 million "goods producing" jobs (ref: 2003 BLS) in support of the 130 million service jobs doesn't strike me as very much. And the US seems bent to grow government, growing the sub-sector of services that is already clearly the largest portion of the services sector. Yikes. "I don't understand the new economy." Allan

To: Rarebird who wrote (77979)	7/27/2003 7:24:38 PM
From: ajtj99	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 209892

Back in 1980, manufacturing was about 50% of the US economy. Today it is probably closer to 20% than 25%. The point? Manufacturing is not as critical to the US economy as it once was. There is a theory that economies evolve from agricultural based, to manufacturing based, to service based, and finally to educational based. We've just moved one step higher on the economic evolutionary ladder, IMO. What has Switzerland manufactured in the last 20-years? The Netherlands? If it's designed and engineered here, distributed here, sold here, and serviced here, we've got our fingers on plenty of economic activity. Furthermore, there's a chance some of the raw materials for that item may have come from here even if it was made from overseas. There is lots of scrap metal and corrugated that is shipped to Asia from the USA, and let's not forget about all the plastic resin manufacturing owned by US companies like GE and Amoco.