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[Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>]

As I wrote before, our manufacturing sector is healthy and we are more  
than competitive with the rest of the world.

Globalization from David Brooks' perspective, with numbers:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/02/opinion/02brooks.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Cognitive Age
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: May 2, 2008


Quotes:
The globalization paradigm has turned out to be very convenient for  
politicians. It allows them to blame foreigners for economic woes. It  
allows them to pretend that by rewriting trade deals, they can assuage  
economic anxiety. It allows them to treat economic and social change  
as a great mercantilist competition, with various teams competing for  
global supremacy, and with politicians starring as the commanding  
generals.

But there’s a problem with the way the globalization paradigm has  
evolved. It doesn’t really explain most of what is happening in the  
world.

Globalization is real and important. It’s just not the central force  
driving economic change. Some Americans have seen their jobs shipped  
overseas, but global competition has accounted for a small share of  
job creation and destruction over the past few decades. Capital does  
indeed flow around the world. But as Pankaj Ghemawat of the Harvard  
Business School has observed, 90 percent of fixed investment around  
the world is domestic. Companies open plants overseas, but that’s  
mainly so their production facilities can be close to local markets.

Nor is the globalization paradigm even accurate when applied to  
manufacturing. Instead of fleeing to Asia, U.S. manufacturing output  
is up over recent decades. As Thomas Duesterberg of Manufacturers  
Alliance/MAPI, a research firm, has pointed out, the U.S.’s share of  
global manufacturing output has actually increased slightly since 1980.

The chief force reshaping manufacturing is technological change  
(hastened by competition with other companies in Canada, Germany or  
down the street). Thanks to innovation, manufacturing productivity has  
doubled over two decades. Employers now require fewer but more highly  
skilled workers. Technological change affects China just as it does  
the America. William Overholt of the RAND Corporation has noted that  
between 1994 and 2004 the Chinese shed 25 million manufacturing jobs,  
10 times more than the U.S.

The central process driving this is not globalization. It’s the skills  
revolution. We’re moving into a more demanding cognitive age. In order  
to thrive, people are compelled to become better at absorbing,  
processing and combining information. This is happening in localized  
and globalized sectors, and it would be happening even if you tore up  
every free trade deal ever inked.

The globalization paradigm emphasizes the fact that information can  
now travel 15,000 miles in an instant. But the most important part of  
information’s journey is the last few inches — the space between a  
person’s eyes or ears and the various regions of the brain. Does the  
individual have the capacity to understand the information? Does he or  
she have the training to exploit it? Are there cultural assumptions  
that distort the way it is perceived?

The globalization paradigm leads people to see economic development as  
a form of foreign policy, as a grand competition between nations and  
civilizations. These abstractions, called “the Chinese” or “the  
Indians,” are doing this or that. But the cognitive age paradigm  
emphasizes psychology, culture and pedagogy — the specific processes  
that foster learning. It emphasizes that different societies are being  
stressed in similar ways by increased demands on human capital. If you  
understand that you are living at the beginning of a cognitive age,  
you’re focusing on the real source of prosperity and understand that  
your anxiety is not being caused by a foreigner.

It’s not that globalization and the skills revolution are  
contradictory processes. But which paradigm you embrace determines  
which facts and remedies you emphasize. Politicians, especially  
Democratic ones, have fallen in love with the globalization paradigm.  
It’s time to move beyond it.