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In a forward-thinking way, shall we look at what the incoming Administration can do about what appears to be issue #1, jobs?
Among the major issues are skills and also areas for jobs that cannot be exported.
A problem is with industrial drill press operators, secretaries,
What I think is missing is something Bill Clinton tRIed to sell .. we need a national industrial policy yhat is long term rather than periodic and wasteful paroxysms about trade agreement or stimilu that look more like pork than adrenaline.
The challenge is world wide, As low cost labor pools grow and as robots multiply, generating cpaiatl .. the feedstock of jobs … and convincing that capital to invest here is a heavy lift. Worse our major competitor, esp China, has a sovereign bank that can choose to invest nationally.
etc., who don’t have an experience base to let them move to new jobs. It’s one thing for me to read up on the advantages and disadvantages of data engineering on sites like justunderstandingdata to get up to speed in the Python programming language when already skilled in the specifics of C and Perl, but, more importantly, I have the underlying conceptual foundation.
To put it in different terms, I’m not a terrible machinist. Ever since I decided to check out something like this HERMLE house exhibition (https://www.metal-supply.dk/announcement/view/105601/husudstillingen_hos_hermle_er_abnet_for_tilmelding), I now know how to run a milling machine or drill press, and I think I can do so relatively efficiently. Not only that though, but I can also program the robotic operation of such a device, using the Enhanced Performance Architecture of the Manufacturing Message Specification. How do we transition the machine operator to that completely different mindset?
New manufacturing methods have both danger and opportunity. More inclusive than “3-D Printing” is the term “additive manufacturing”, which is fundamentally different than classic machining. A drill press or mill takes material away from a blank of material. A 3-D printer, or a sintering system, builds up from nothing. These techniques literally provide new ways to do things that COULD NOT be done with subtractive manufacturing, since they can create from inside out.
Infrastructure, which cannot be exported, is generally important to the nation, and a dollar spent in infrastructure generally creates more jobs than the same money spent in the defense industry. Let’s look at the electrical grid, which is more and more endangered by cyberattack, and also simply doesn’t fit modern utility economics.
Before massive deregulation, electrical utilities operated as technical monopolies, with a return-on-investment model that encouraged the building of reserve capacity. With deregulation, the various generating and distribution companies had to reduce costs — and capacity — to please shareholders. Further, the old grid was set up for occasional interconnection to help with peak loads. There are fundamental differences (e.g., primarily DC rather than AC high-voltage cores) in systems meant for flexible sale of power. These are needed for reliability and really need new construction. Not recently, but I’ve seen figures of $20-50 billion to renovate the electrical grid for efficient transfer, cogeneration, etc.
Mr. President-Elect, there’s little corporate economic incentive to do this. To you and the Secretary of Energy Designate, how do you propose to make this happen, or do you?