The Idea in Brief
- Thanks to destructive outsourcing and faltering investment in research, the U.S. has lost or is on the verge of losing its ability to develop and manufacture a slew of high-tech products.
- To address this crisis, government and business must work together to rebuild the country’s
industrial commons
- —the collective R&D, engineering, and manufacturing capabilities that sustain innovation. Both must step up their funding of research and encourage collaborative R&D initiatives to tackle society’s big problems. And companies must overhaul the management practices and governance structures that have caused them to make destructive outsourcing decisions.
- Only by rejuvenating its high-tech sector can the U.S. hope to return to the path of sustained growth needed to pay down its huge deficits and raise its citizens’ standard of living.
As the United States strives to recover from the current economic crisis, it’s going to discover an unpleasant fact: The competitiveness problem of the 1980s and early 1990s didn’t really go away. It was just hidden during the bubble years behind a mirage of prosperity, and all the while the country’s industrial base continued to erode.