made in the usa - vaclav smil

[...]... fossil fuels The final uses of these energies take place in boilers, raising pressurized steam for massive electricitygenerating turbines; in furnaces; and in prime movers: gasoline-fueled car engines are now the most numerous converters, large diesel engines powering container ships the most efficient kind, and jet engines used in commercial airplanes the most reliable designs (Smil 2010) The largest... be, but it bears repeating in a society where most minds are divorced from the fundamentals of making things: well-being in the modern world is defined by our dependence on a multitude of products, physical objects that must be made by first transforming raw materials (by smelting, refining, reacting, separating, synthesizing) into a wide variety of intermediate products, ranging from metals to plastics,... bulk breaking and redistribution in smaller lots (assigned to wholesale trade), the custom cutting of metals and customized assembly of computers (assigned to retail trade), and the entire sector of “publishing and the combined activity of publishing and printing” (assigned to information) because the value of the product to the consumer lies in the information content, not in the format in which it... and the final assembly is done by Hon Hai Precision Industry, a Taiwanese company trading as Foxconn and operating a giant plant in Shenzhen, Guandong province In 2009, exports of iPhones from China to the United States added about $2 billion to the US trade deficit when the accounting uses the total manufacturing cost But the assembly in China added less than 4% of the total, which means that the. .. exponentials has already begun (Morgan 2010) Obviously, any material- and energy-intensive mass-scale manufacturing is an anathema to these efforts, and the declining fortunes of modern manufacturing are seen as desirable steps toward a long-term goal of true sustainability The second line of reasoning leading to unconcern about manufacturing’s declining fortunes, and one that is much more common and widely... category D) In contrast, the US domestic accounts, using NAICS codes 31–33, indicate even lower shares: 14.2% in 2000, 11.2% in 2009, 11.7% in 2010, and 12.2% in 2011—and only about 11% when subtracting foreign -made components of US -made products (USBC 2012a) In 2011, government services contributed about 13%, financial services (including insurance and real estate) topped the sectoral ranking at about... 2012) In the United States, manufacturing’s share of GDP declined from 27% in 1950 to less than 23% by 1970 and to 13.3% in the year 2000; after a small rise to 14.1% in 2007 it declined to 12.9% in 2009, then rose a bit to 13.5% in 2010 I should note that all of these comparisons are based on the UN’s data using ISIC categories (International Standard Industrial Classification, manufacturing being category... And there is more: defining manufacturing as the transformation of materials into new products hinges on the definition of “new,” and hence on an inevitably subjective setting of boundaries The NAICS offers a longish list of activities that are considered to be suppliers of new products, starting with bottling and pasteurizing milk and packaging and processing seafood, through apparel jobbing (assigning... While there may be no perfect way to disaggregate the relative contributions of individual factors driving economic growth, there can be no doubt that innovation, rather than labor or capital, has been its most important driver In turn, there is no doubt that technical innovation in modern Western societies has originated overwhelmingly in the manufacturing sector The sector has been always the principal... distributed (i.e., the book or software diskette)” (USBC 2010) In light of these realities, there is no doubt that the lack of a modern, realistic, and inclusive definition of manufacturing is not only of statistical interest, it is a barrier to judging the sector’s true performance and to formulating informed policies (van Opstal 2010) Finally, there are differences between the two ways of measuring the sector’s . permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging -in- Publication Data Smil, Vaclav. Made in the USA : the rise and retreat of American manufacturing / Vaclav Smil. p. cm. Includes. Life Energies Feeding the World Enriching the Earth The Earth’s Biosphere Energy at the Crossroads China’s Past, China’s Future Creating the 20th Century Transforming the 20th Century Energy: A Beginner’s. bibliographical references and index. ISBN 97 8-0 -2 6 2-0 193 8-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 97 8-0 -2 6 2-3 167 5-0 (retail e-book) 1. Manufacturing industries—United States. 2. Industrial policy—United States.