Eventually we are not going to manufacture anything. Nobody wants to manufacture, everyone wants to be a broker
The above quote was from a documentary airing on HBO now called Schmatta: Rags to Riches to Rags and I thought it was a very telling quote that expands well beyond just the fashion industry and is a microcosm of our society and economy as a whole. Our country does not make hardly anything anymore. It is all “outsourced” to the global economy. In a nutshell, that is what much of the documentary was about, the fall of the NY fashion industry as the manufacturing of the clothing has been sent to China and India to be done at a much cheaper price. A very telling example was a story about one clothing manufacturer who years back employed over 250 fashion workers to create the clothing line. Today that very same company has four employees, all family members, and all they do is broker clothing made in China for the buyers in NY.
We see similar occurrences taking place in all industries across the country. None more famous and effecting on our daily lives than the recent mortgage crisis that almost took our economy totally out and down for the count. Now there is a small difference in that we were not outsourcing those jobs, but we did have too many people in the middle simply acting as brokers. They were simply the means by which the banks got large amounts of mortgages in order for them to bundle them as a mortgage backed security and sold on to foreign and domestic investors alike. These brokers made incredible amounts of money and really provided no real service nor produced any goods. Some would say they provided a dis-service.
But that is the point here, we no longer make anything of any real tangible substance. We have become a “service” society, and we don’t even do that well. Even so, that is not the foundation we need to build into the future. Our titans of industry have been vanquished, everything from steel to auto makers, we produce barely nothing.
In the documentary, there was a lot of talk of globalization and the needs for jobs to be spread out to create and maintain this new global economy. However, instead of our global partners being dependent on us as a superpower of industry, the tables have been turned and we are no longer in any drivers seat. While being a broker is the easy way to make money while providing little tangible value, it is not and should not be the American way. We need to return to our position on the global stage of providing real tangible value and in turn rebuild the foundation that has been lost over the last couple of decades.
