text: Being an engineer in the aerospace industry I was highly interested in this book based on my experiences from the vantage point a "hard industry." I personally believe that it's in our long term interests to maintain a strong manufacturing base because that's the foundation of real wealth, not legal services or newswires. So this book sounded like the perfect source of information to explain our current economic situation, give an assessment of how bad or how good it really is, and suggest ways to improve it. Oh, how very, very wrong I was . . .  
  
  This book started off strong, . . . for about four pages. After that a litany of tortured logic, un-sourced assertions, facts taken completely out of context except for the author's subjectively added adjectives, Orwellian double-speak, sleight of hand arguments, flat out ridiculuos statements, contradictory assessments, and even emotional vitriol coalesced not so much into an argument for industry but one for eighteenth century mercantilism with perhaps a sprinkling of far left George Soros on top to serve as an update for the twenty first century. 
  
  Even a broken watch is correct twice a day though, so there were some good points in the book which buy it the 2 star rating. These include: 
  
  - Manufacturing provides a large source of proprietary knowledge which both improves productivity and serves as a barrier of entry, creating an industry with a large base of high paying jobs, provided it's run right. (A big if.) 
  
  - High wage nations can still compete effectively with low wage nations in manufacturing by being capital intensive. 
  
  - Americans need to save more and our education system needs to produce more engineers and technically oriented graduates. 
  
  - There is some excess in the financial services and managers of publicly traded companies take too short term a view, leading them to sell the company upriver in the long run because of a personal temporary short term gain. (i.e. Enron)  
  
  A scholarly, fair, and comprehensive book that focused on the above would be extremely interesting and useful. This is not what you'll get in this book though. Instead you'll get:
  
  A begining section about postindustrialism, things like the internet, information technology, financial services, etc., the things that make the services based economy. In three chapters the author simply sets up straw men by taking the worst examples of post industrial advocates, instead of presenting a comprehensive picture of the post industrial argument. Not being satisfied with this he proceeds to beat the straw men, set them on fire, and piss on the smoldering remains. This is where vitriol even comes out, where he equates the post-industrialists to people incapable of even thinking. If someone has to go to this extreme to make their argument, they probably don't have one. Most telling he leaves the final assessment of the value of the internet to a feminist. To me, this would be like leaving the final assessment of how good a bicycle is to, oh, I don't know, let's say a fish.
  
  A middle section extolls the virtues of manufacturing. This is a bunch of hand picked anectdotal stories and there's no overview of manufacturing in the world or its real impact on economies at large. This is the kind of subject that screams for reams of data, charts of GDP growth over time, pie charts of the breakdown of economies into services, manufacture, agriculture, etc. You will get none of that. There's little value except in reassuring the obvious, high wage nations CAN do manufacturing. Many of these cherry-picked anectdotal examples still don't quite dove-tail with all his claims about manufacturing though! You also know you're being left in the dark with a plethora of CYA disclaimer statments like "while Industry_X has certainly had its share of problems recently . . ." at the begining of a section.   
  
  A final section basically amounts to an attack on laissez-faire, free markets, and the concept of free trade. George Soros and a bunch of other lefties, with Pat Buchanan thrown in for "balance", should be listened to instead. 
  
  The worst part of this book is the author's lack of an ability to make any sort of coherent argument. Examples of twisted thinking abound:
  
  - A post-industrial "industry" grows five times over in a certain period. The author then goes onto explain how this is not really real growth but something that in reality is bad. Later he proves how great a manufacturing industry is because in the same period it grows a whopping 60%! Self contradictory evaluations of the performance of services vs manufacturing is common and always falls down on the side that the manufacturing industry is far far better than the service industry even when all the standard economic indicators suggest otherwise. The author's challenge to the reader seems to be "who are you going to believe? Me, or your lying eyes?" 
  
  - He rips into American post industrial industries as being labor intensive and vulnerable to low wage nations because Americans are no smarter or more creative or more anything than laborers around the world. Later he talks about how great German manufacturing is because Germans are so much more diligent than the rest of the world's workers. 
  
  - The only facts he presents - and they are surprisingly thin and overwhelmed by mere assertions - are always modified by his subjective opinion and never put in context. When describing service industries "paltry" $50 million revenues, "only" 60,000 jobs, "disappointing" 24% of revenues from foreign sources is common. But when describing manufacturing "a very high" $6 million revenues, "a good mix" of 1,500 jobs, and similar glowing assessments are inevitable despite the number to follow. A number in and of itself means nothing. The fact the author leaves out any head on, direct comparison between industries is telling. 
  
  - Official figures are the ultimate source of information when they agree with what the author believes. When the official figures don't agree with him, he finds some loner who does and then barely explains how this time around the official figures are somehow wrong. When attacking his straw men though, he accuses them of ignoring official figures and quoting some loner.  
  
  - Gems of Orwellian double-speak sentences include examples like "Solar is already a fully competitive source of energy in remote areas that do not have grid electricity. (pg. 184)" I.e. it's competitive where there is NO competition! And "Even in Singapore, one of the freest societies in the East, the savings rate was successfully boosted by a system of forced savings . . . (pg. 229)" That's not very free if it's FORCED is it? (His defense of solar is one of the most hilariously pathetic eight pages I've ever read and really is worth the price of the book. He capstones it with the "most encouraging" observation that solar cells have gone from producing one third of the energy used to make them before they wore out - that is consuming more total energy in their manufacture than they eventually make!- to now producing three times as much energy as required to produce them before they wear out. Wow, what an achievement. Any ACTUAL power source converts many thousands of times the energy used to manufacture it before it's internal workings wear out, but whatever . . .)
  
  - Americans are dumb and the only successful American companies basically blundered into monopolies on standards. The American economy, despite the statistics, is in bad shape. The Japanese instead are eight feet tall, can read people's minds and see through lead. The Japanese economy, despite the statistics, is in really great shape. This type of persistently biased characterization makes you question everything he claims, and eliminates any value or truth he might actually have in his arguments. The author basically can't get out of his own way.  
  
  - He always attacks opponents of his viewpoint by claiming that they don't put numbers into context, are using twisted logic, making mere assertions instead of quoting facts, etc., apparently oblivious that these are the very same tactics he himself uses!
  
  - He claims Boeing is no longer a good company because 30% of components in a Boeing aircraft are now made abroad vs. 2% in the 1960's. This is actually because foreign manufacturing for those components happens to be better and cheaper. America isn't doing that badly in aerospace by the way. The author fails to mention that 50% of the "European" Airbus is made in America. This is an example of free trade actually distributing production to where it is most efficient. 
  
  The list goes on and on to ridiculous proportions. You'd have to buy the book to see them all because there's at least one thing an alert and critical reader can find highly questionable on each page. 
  
  All in all, this book was way off the mark and a highly squandered opportunity. It's really a mercantilist argument, and the only common thread that I could see in all the author's cloudy reasoning is that nation's should do everything in their power to export more than they import no matter what. It's NOT, unfortunately, a book about how to revitalize American manufacturing in a globalized world.
  