Manufacturing Our Way to Success*

From silk to steel, the world’s most successful civilizations have been built on the strength of their exports.

*This is an abridged version of the original article, which can be viewed here.

In an era when screens have become central to our lives, it can be challenging to divert attention away from Google, Facebook, and Snapchat to look at what comes next. Are cloud computing and mobile apps the only things that matter? In Silicon Valley, where tech startups are prized above all else, the answer certainly seems to be ‘yes.’

A huge part of Silicon Valley-style innovation consists of companies that enable people to thrive without traditional human connections. Airbnb allows you to live away from home without ever settling into a permanent community; Facebook allows you to keep up with friends without ever seeing them; Google allows you to find answers without asking people questions; and Amazon allows you to buy everything you need without interacting with a single person.

But if we look beyond the San Francisco Bay Area, we can see artifacts of a time when there was more to life than laptops and cell phones: Detroit’s auto factories, Pittsburgh’s steel mills, Chicago’s printing presses, North Carolina’s furniture plants. These manufacturing centers aren’t coming back, and there’s no reason to try.

Nonetheless, there are consequences to outsourcing manufacturing know-how. Tesla has struggled to establish a profitable auto manufacturing business in the…