On the importance of manufacturing
A colleague forwarded me this Washington Post article, asking my thoughts on the argument that even first-world countries need manufacturing.
I agree with the overarching premise: a country should have a manufacturing base. After all, not everyone is destined to be a white-collar information worker; nor should we strive to create a society where everyone is.
I suspect part of Germany’s manufacturing strength comes from their proactive public policy on cleantech, but will allow that my thinking may be biased. 
Though most PV panels are made in China and installed in Germany, I imagine there’s still a lot of local manufacturing done for inverters and other subsystem components. Best of all for Germany, by adopting first, their manufacturing firms will have an advantage over French, Spanish, and other nearby counterparts when they eventually adopt the technology.
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A few days before that article, Andy Grove got some column inches in an opinion piece about how high-tech doesn’t grow as many jobs as it used to, basically because web2.0 doesn’t involve manufacturing. Which makes sense: apps are all “knowledge work” — there’s no physical manufacturing involved.
I’d like to think Grove is arguing that there’s an overarching benefit to having some manufacturing and its associated skill sets in one’s country. Mainly because that’s my feeling.
There should be market niches where in-country manufacturing is cost-competitive with overseas manufacturing — especially in emerging fields where you might want to keep the IP and know-how close. Most of W.L. Gore’s plants are in the US, for example. And earlier-stage high-tech companies will probably want to keep manufacturing close to their technical experts — until they’ve mastered the process well enough that the factory can largely run on their own.
To be clear, lower-tech manual assembly work will drift to the cheapest qualified labour pool (continuing its trend over the years) and there’s no advantage trying to stem that tide. But that’s no reason for a society not to seek opportunities to develop manufacturing capabilities where know-how still counts.