MEGAN MCARDLE: Obama’s Speech Is A Confession Of Impotence.
Obama has been promising green jobs for years, and failing to deliver them for just as long. There’s little evidence that more environmentally friendly energy sources will be net job creators. The middle class may enjoy bluer skies if we convert more of our power generation capacity to wind and solar. But we’ve no reason to think that they’ll enjoy more green in their wallets.
The manufacturing innovation institute, meanwhile, is just another iteration of an idea that’s been around for longer than Barack Obama has. Go to any Rust Belt city and you’ll find research campuses, innovation institutes and similar institutions named after hopeful politicians who promised that a new manufacturing base would coalesce around this exciting agglomeration of creative minds. Unfortunately, in most instances it has turned out that manufacturing bases would rather coalesce around cheap land, low taxes and acres of uncongested freeway.
Besides, the problem in America is not that we suddenly lost our manufacturing mojo. In fact, we’re still very good at it; according to the Boston Consulting Group, the inflation-adjusted value of our manufacturing output has more than doubled since 1972. But our manufacturing employment is down by one-third, because production is highly automated in most industries. Even small metalworking operations now use computer-aided design and robots as much as they do grizzled machinists.
The same problem besets other areas the president leaned hard on … evergreen promises like better education and infrastructure. These are splendid ideas — America’s port and rail infrastructure badly needs updating, and a better-educated workforce is a worthy goal. But these things will not magically produce loads more manufacturing jobs, much less boost the income share of the middle class to 1970s levels. They will make the economy somewhat more efficient, we hope. But that efficiency, if it comes at all, will be decades away. And especially in the case of education, it may not come.
We have a very good idea of how to construct port architecture capable of receiving a supertanker. On the other hand, we are not very good at keeping inner city and rural kids from dropping out of high school. And the main policy lever that Obama has at his disposal — pouring more money into the school system — is not very well correlated with improved outcomes. In fact, we’ve been trying it for decades in our nation’s worst schools, with not much to show for it.
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