The Myth of Post-Industrialism

[Kamaji]

The Myth of Post-Industrialism

Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell told America that manufacturing didn’t matter. He was wrong.

Eamonn Fingleton
Oct 17, 2022

In the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the U.S. Navy doubled its fleet within a year and quadrupled it before the end of the war. It was a similar story in the merchant marine. By 1943, U.S. shipyards were turning out three merchant ships a day. They ended up building a total of nearly 3,300 ships before the end of the war. Given that shipbuilding was then one of the world’s most advanced industries, there could hardly have been a more impressive demonstration of America’s global economic leadership.

Fast forward to today, and we discover that America’s hollowed-out manufacturing sector is having a hard time arming Ukraine and can do so only with the help of copious imports of advanced electronic components from various trade partners, not least China.

Why has the U.S. manufacturing base become so hollowed out? One key yet little understood aspect of the story: the pernicious role played by so-called post-industrialism.

The term comes from The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, a book by the Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell. Writing in 1973, Bell predicted a growing trend for the United States of retreat from manufacturing and a switch instead to new “post-industrial” services, of which computer software seemed to be his favorite. Jobs in post-industrial businesses would be not only cleaner and more advanced but better paid. Best of all, the United States seemed to enjoy some special (if never exactly spelled out) aptitude for post-industrial activities and would therefore benefit disproportionately.

As we will see, this analysis was badly misguided, but that did not stop it playing a decisive role in the decline of American manufacturing.

The idea of post-industrialism greatly weakened efforts in Washington and elsewhere to forge a national consensus in fighting foreign protectionism. If American manufacturers were not long for this world anyway, why should Washington expend vital diplomatic capital on their behalf? After all, nations like Japan, Germany, and Korea were so intransigently committed to mercantilism that Washington risked touching off a full-scale trade war if it pressed fully seriously for a fair deal for American manufacturers abroad.

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Source:  https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-myth-of-post-industrialism/

[Fishrrman]

Do we want "an industrial society" back?
One that actually manufactures things again?
One that extracts the needed natural resources right here?

Because THIS is what it looked like back in the day:

(Altoona, PA, in the steam era)

Housewives in Altoona had to "wash the walls" once or twice a year to get the coal dust (and other dust) out.
And of course, if you stepped outside, you could smell the coal smoke.

But... that was also "the smell" of... prosperity.

I think we need to re-establish such a society.
But there are also trade-offs.
Are we willing to accept them?