Bringing back "Made in America"

Can we seize this opportunity? [Link]

But quality control weaknesses in overseas manufacturing of toys, tires, and toothpaste have resulted in huge losses in reputation and value, environmental repercussions, and employee layoffs. Our overseas competitors are learning from these lessons and developing advanced automation to ensure consistent product quality. The next wave of high-value products will require assembly at the micro and nano scales, where manual labor is no longer an option. These trends suggest enormous opportunities.

US manufacturing is not a lost cause: the production of goods from consumer electronics to industrial equipment accounts for 14 percent of the U.S. GDP and 11 percent of U.S. employment. But U.S. manufacturing today is where database technology was in the early 1960's, a patchwork of ad hoc solutions that lacked the rigorous methodology that leads to scientific innovation. That all changed in 1970 when Ted Codd, an IBM mathematician, invented relational algebra, an elegant mathematical database model that galvanized federally funded research leading to today's $14 billion database industry.

Hopefully, we can do what Japan did to us in the 50's with regard to manufacturing.