We’ve all seen the ad in which a bespectacled, pencil-necked geek boasts of getting a job at GE, prompting his burly, blue collar old man to present him with his grandpa’s sledgehammer, only to mock him for being too effete to life it because he’s a member of the digirati. It’s meant to rebrand an old-line industrial giant as a high tech company.
But it also sums up the current mood of the country. Most Trump and Cruz and Sanders voters are on the old man’s side. Blue collar America is down for the count, our glory days are behind us, foreigners have stolen our sweaty jobs, we can no longer compete. It’s the fault of President Obama, Wall Street greed, wily Chinese, an unpatriotic managerial class, bad trade deals, American stupidity.
And yet, investigators keep discovering this is only a fraction of the story. Yes, the old industrial model is gone, and the father in the ad is doomed to disappointment if he’s waiting for it to come back. But the kid in the ad has got a job, for pretty good pay, in a new-fangled field, in America.
As the Preacher said, “one generation passeth away, and another generation cometh….” Richard Florida popularized the idea of a new creative class and the cities where they incubate ideas. Awhile back I took note of a James Fallows piece in “The Atlantic” in which he found small towns and cities where a rebirth is taking place. Now, in “The Smartest Places on Earth,” economist Antoine van Agtmael, who coined the notion of emerging markets, and Fred Bakker, a business journalist, have joined the chorus.
They chronicle how rustbelt cities from Albany to Akron and from Batesville, Mississippi to Eindhoven in The Netherlands are rethinking their roots, creating collaborations between university, industry and government, and becoming hotspots of innovation.
Their report originated when the authors were surprised to hear emerging market competitors worry aloud that, with wages rising, supply chain costs looming large, and the demand for smarter products increasing, the easy pickings for them were over. Now they were having to compete with more innovative foes and they were not in China or India but back in Europe and the USA.
So, for example, a hard-charging new president of The University of Akron decides his school is neglecting its duty to the students and the community to adapt its education to the 21st Century economy. He reorganizes the curriculum, creates fruitful collaborations with the technical expertise of the rubber industry that remained behind when the manufacturing went to cheaper markets, and got government seed money to fund the transition. The result is that Akron is now an international hub of polymer chemical innovation with dozens of start-ups.
In Portland, Oregon, a huge $500 million grant from hometown boy Phil Knight teamed the Oregon Health and Science University with Intel’s digital expertise to reimagine medical research and practice. Old jobs may never come back. Some angry displaced persons may never recover from the economic transition, but others will relocate, retool and reeducate themselves to adapt to the change. And their children will leave grandpa’s sledgehammer behind and enter Sonny’s high tech future.
Van Agtmael and Bakker, politely but firmly, suggest that all the whining, finger-pointing and crepe hanging by politicians is counterproductive. They could lend a hand instead, by helping to facilitate the transition with targeted educational efforts and seed money. Governments in Europe and in states and localities have done so with success. They have created mutually profitable collaborations with industry and effective apprenticeship programs that supply the workers that the new economy requires.
By contrast, the Federal government, largely due to Republican recalcitrance, has fought efforts to spur a clean energy evolution, to up our educational game, to update outmoded infrastructure, to devote more resources to medical research, and so forth. Ironically, the party of business has turned its back on numerous initiatives that would have profited the country. The more we moan about being left behind, the more likely it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. But evidence suggests, it doesn’t have to be that way. Adapt or die.