We're Running on Empty and Choking on Globaloney

Of late, automobile drivers have been wheeling into gas stations and finding out that their cars don't run on information and that the highways they drive on are made of solid concrete. The cars need gas and the highways aren't virtual. The price of gas, that retro, leftover commodity from the industrial age, has jumped up a peg or two these past weeks, although I doubt that the zip code 10021 boobies in their $45,000 sport utility vehicles have noticed.

They may in due time, even as others recall that predictions made a quarter-century ago during the fuel crisis of that time have come to pass. It was said then that the day would come when we would have to import most of our oil. Now America has indeed been all but pumped dry of reachable oil, although, as the Republicans repeatedly tell us, there is still untapped stuff to be had if we will kindly permit the drilling crews and the pipeline gangs into the national forests and parks. What they don't tell us that, even if we do let the hard hats into those quiet places, we'll still have to import most of the oil we use because we use so much of it.

If the forecasts of significant electrical brownouts this summer are borne out, we may again turn to the topic of oil when standby oil-powered generators are put one line. Otherwise, we'll let the subject pass, as we slip, month by month, into greater dependency on imported oil, secure in our faith that a nation as deserving as the United States can trust to those who supply it with essentials and luxuries to treat us as we wish to be treated and ought to be treated because we are so goddamn good.

Besides being so extra special good, we have been designated by a beneficent destiny to achieve a gravity-free existence while the rest of the world's people are tethered to earth by the weight of their bodies. Only we Americans take wing merely by spreading our arms and mounting the summit of history to look down on the post-industrial e-world. Thus, we've begun our much-touted new century awash in globaloney.

Globaloney is a belief in a global new economy in which we Americans get to do all the buzzy-jazzy stuff, and everybody else does the work. We make our living selling the drone-peoples information, creativity, financial services, ideas, insurance policies, movies, mental products, music, concepts, intellectual property and a diffuse but enthusiastic entrepreneurial oomph. In return they sell us food, clothing and shelter.

So far globaloney has worked so well that every month it is recorded that we buy more than we sell so that our foreign debt is mounting up into the trillions, but so far the foreigners we owe so much to have been good enough not to demand payment. As this system has been put in place, we have seen one old economy nation after another surpass American workers in pay and benefits, although not American managers, who continue to lead the world in compensation.

Globaloney has as one of its major tenets that manufacturing is good for others but not for Americans because it's all dirty, low-paid work we wouldn't want to do when we can be creative and sell foreigners ingenious things like shares in hedge funds, which they've shown precious little interest in buying until now. We've gotten so wrapped up in crusading against the coolie wages Nike and other sneaker makers pay for production workers that we have misled ourselves into thinking that kind of marginal, low-value activity is what the bulk of the world's manufacturing consists of. It doesn't.

The kind of manufacturing they do in manufacturing-based economies like Switzerland, Germany, Singapore and Japan is clean work performed in plants sufficiently high tech to impress a brain-proud American. For some disturbing facts about how other advanced countries have gotten richer than us through manufacturing, I recommend In Praise of Hard Industries, by Eamonn Fingleton, a former editor at the Financial Times and Forbes magazine. Globaloney to the contrary, Mr. Fingleton demonstrates that the never-ceasing chant about how it is inevitable that good-paying factory jobs must disappear is flatly untrue. Those good-paying factory jobs have been disappearing in America all right, and they have not been reappearing in underdeveloped nations like Mexico and the Philippines, but in the non-backward, high-wage societies of Europe and the Pacific rim. It just isn't true that we all must either starve or become computer programmers and Wall Street slicksters.

Mr. Fingleton points out that, although final assembly mass production may be relatively low-skilled, low-pay propositions, the manufacture of component parts is anything but. Only some manufacturing is suitable for untrained, non-literate people of a rural, village background. It's not accident which explains why Volvos are not produced in Guatemala.

If automobile manufacture is so old-fashioned that you might as well leave it to Mexicans, why do Germany and Japan continue to make fat livings off the industry? The brawn and brute basic industries we erroneously link in our minds with Rust Belt businesses suitable only for export to the low-pay labor forces of Third World nations. Yet from the manufacture of steel, silicon or modern exotic materials to machine tools to textiles, manufacturing industries are happily lodged in one high-living-standard nation after another. Japan doesn't make its money setting up advertising agencies in other countries; it makes a better living than we do with no natural resources by importing low-priced raw materials and converting them into high-priced manufactured goods.

It bears investigating where and how the prejudice against making things got started in the United States. It goes back 40 or 50 years in New York, a city whose leading people have done their level best to chase manufacturing out of town and have succeeded with a flourish. Perhaps the antipathy begins with the linking of manufacturing with pollution, filth and grime, although one would be hard-pressed to name a factory giving off worse fumes than the noxious vapors escaping through the sealed high-rise windows of our leading law firms and financial conglomerates. Manufacturing dirt, of course, can be ameliorated or cleaned up completely, which is more than can be said of the swindle that has become high finance.

The other day, The Wall Street Journal quoted a Silicon Valley economist as saying that "until the mid-1990's, we sold products. Now, we sell stocks." He has it right. Globaloney's central article of faith is that we can make a good living out of selling other people stocks and the chitter-chatter-gee-whiz-bang of the Internet. It hasn't turned out that way. The New Economy companies earn as little abroad as they do at home. The financial industry, which is among the greatest ballyhooers of globaloney, is able to repatriate a trickle of profits back to the United States. What makes enough money to prevent the trade imbalance from being even greater than it is? It's American manufacturers of tractors, airplanes, pharmaceuticals and agriculture, which is so old that it was sustaining the American economy before the Revolution.

It's bad enough when you're standing on the sidewalk admiring the emperor's new clothes, but, Jay-sus, when you're so sot-headed you think you can make a living weaving and cutting the cloth for the clothes, there's no hope for you. We have delivered ourselves into the hands of futurists, mountebanks, trendists, carnival barkers, gurus, facile-mouth musicians, fadists, bubble-brained enthusiasts, fakirs and confidence men. One globaloney on rye, hold the mayo but not the pickle.