Make It In America

It's making my reading list later than the title should have caused, but I plan to read it nonetheless.  Andrew Liveris, CEO of Dow Chemical, wrote about the need to "re-invent" U.S. manufacturing as the key to our economy.  He argues for a national manufacturing policy and for an increased focus on STEM education.

Here's a Wall Street Journal review excerpt:

“Manufacturing still accounts for nearly one in 10 U.S. nonfarm jobs as measured by the government, and those jobs tend to pay much better than burger-flipping or barista gigs. . . Between 1997 and 2009, we lost six million U.S. manufacturing jobs, or around a third of the total. How much should we care? Plenty, says Andrew Liveris, chairman and chief executive of Dow Chemical.  In Make It in America, he calls for a national strategy to revive manufacturing. We need manufacturing jobs, he says, if we are to keep a growing population busy and start paying off our debts to the rest of the world. Some Americans imagine that we can thrive by continuing to dream up gadgets like iPhones and Kindles while letting the Chinese do all the tedious work of making the products themselves. Mr. Liveris disagrees. . . Mr. Liveris doesn't shy away from proposing ideas that have defeated countless other reformers. For instance, he wants to overhaul our K-12 education system so that it will concentrate more on science, math and engineering. That promises to be a long struggle, he admits. ‘I pushed science at the dinner table with my kids,’ writes Mr. Liveris, who loved chemistry as a boy, ‘but none of them ended up going into engineering.’”

Can't wait to read it.