American Innovators: Coming Out of China’s Shadow
You remember that policy? It’s the one that Biden said he was not second-guessing. In the clip, he correctly identifies the major demographic problem. Dependent parents are outnumbering wage-earning children. Once you complicate that with forced sterilizations, meager pensions, 336 Million abortions in 40 years, and the massive gender imbalance, you have created serious demographic instability.
There will be too few young to take care of the old, which will severely burden their government programs. There will be (and are now) labor shortages, which will end the cheap labor that our cheap products rely upon. China will hit the Lewis Point, and crash. The IMF expects it will happen in seven years..
How can you get manufacturing to return? With the classic American solution: by innovating. China has large factories like Detroit did, just with lower expenses. But what if you bypassed the whole supply chain and the expenses that go with it?
There is a new product on the market whose advocates claim could do for manufacturing what iTunes did for music. It’s the 3D printer. It works like a regular printer, but instead of putting a flat image on paper, it builds a real-world object.
You might remember the story earlier this year about when the first functional, 3D-printed gun made the news. Perhaps you’ve seen the TED talk with Anthony Atala who told us about medical procedures already printing replacement blood vessels, kidneys, skin and bones.
What are some things being made with 3D printing? (Besides NASA’s announcement that they’re sending one to the ISS for parts-on-demand?) Here is a list of 20 (includes musical instruments, fabric and shoes), and another list of 10, including meat, a house, rocket parts, liquid metal parts.
We’re not yet at the point where we can skip manufacturing altogether in favor of custom-designed objects. Some in the business are warning about putting too much hope in this. Maybe they’re right, but in the early stages of internet few could have imagined how it would take off, either.
What I do know, is that those already alert to new opportunities (whatever they might be) are the ones most likely to capitalize on them, and if this trend leads toward decentralized production, we might even see the return of the entrepreneur.
Who knows, maybe one of our readers could be a leader in the next tech wave. Maybe it’s you.
Images: Huangshan mountain in China; uploaded by — Immanuel Giel; public domain