Rebuilding What We’ve Lost
In 1949, America’s ten most-affluent metropolitan areas, as determined by median household income, were Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Chicago, Dayton, Akron, San Francisco, New York, and Hartford, Connecticut. Washington, D.C., was 15th, trailing Youngstown, Rochester, Buffalo, and Columbus.
This list no doubt strikes many contemporary readers as surreal—even bizarre. How could the rust-belt cities of Detroit and Cleveland ever have been richer than D.C. and New York?
In a word, manufacturing. There are many ways to redistribute wealth—the governmental subsidies of D.C. and the financial shenanigans of New York being but two examples. But there are only a handful of ways to create wealth, the most potent of which is manufacturing. Extracting the silica used to make computer chips creates a certain amount of wealth. Using that silica to manufacture computer chips creates vastly more wealth, and using those computer chips to manufacture the myriad machines and devices that use those chips creates even more wealth.
There are additional benefits to having an economy based on manufacturing. The example of silica chips shows the close connection between manufacturing and innovation. Without silica chips, there would be no Silicon Valley and all the inventions that have come from there.
