Where have all those tinkerers gone? Why has the United States fallen behind other countries in manufacturing? If we zoom out, the bigger global picture shows a conflagration of complex political and economic forces. My focus is on something more tangible—the loss of essential technical skills, for the reasons I’ve mentioned: our failure to replace people with manufacturing expertise as they leave the job market, our ceding the manufacture of not only cheap volume goods but high-tech products to foreign companies, and an education system that screens out the very people most suited to perform
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