2013年6月第一套
A Nation That's Losing Its Toolbox
The scene inside the Home Depot on Weyman Avenue here would give the old-time American craftsman pau.
In Aisle 34 is precut plastic flooring, the glue already in place. In Aisle 26 are prefabricated windows. Stacked near the checkout counters, and as colorful as a Fisher-Price toy, is a not-so-rious-looking power tool: a battery-operated saw-and-drill combination. And if you don't want to do it yourlf, head to Aisle 23 or Aisle 35, where a help desk will arrange for an installer.
It's all very handy stuff, I guess, a convenient way to be a do-it-yourlfer without being all that good with tools. But at a time when the American factory ems to be a shrinking prence, and when good manufacturing jobs have vanished, perhaps never to return, th
ere is something deeply troubling about this dilution of American craftsmanship.
This isn't a lament (伤感双层房车) - or not merely a lament - for bygone times. It's a social and cultural issue, as well as an economic one. The Home Depot approach to craftsmanship -simplify it, dumb it down, hire a contractor - is one signal that mastering tools and working with one's hands is receding in America as a hobby, as a valued skill, as a cultural influence that shaped thinking and behavior in vast ctions of the country.
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That should be a matter of concern in a presidential election year. Yet neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney promotes himlf as tool-savvy (使用工具很在行的温中散寒) presidential timber, in the mold of a Jimmy Carter, a skilled carpenter and cabinet maker.
The Obama administration does worry publicly about manufacturing, a first cousin of craftsmanship. When the Ford Motor Company, for example, recently announced that it was bringing some production home, the White Hou cheered. "When you e things like Ford moving new production from Mexico to Detroit, instead of the other way around, you know things are changing," says Gene Sperling, director of the National Economic C
ouncil.
Ask the administration or the Republicans or most academics why America needs more manufacturing, and they respond that manufacturing gives birth to innovation, brings down the trade deficit, strengthens the dollar, generates jobs, arms the military and brings about a recovery from recession. But rarely, if ever, do they publicly take the argument a step further, asrting that a growing manufacturing ctor encourages craftsmanship and that craftsmanship is, if not a birthright, then a vital ingredient of the American lf-image as a can-do, inventive, we-can-make-anything people.
Traditional vocational training in public high schools is gradually declining, stranding thousands of young people who ek training for a craft without going to college. Colleges, for their part, have since 1985 graduated fewer chemical, mechanical, industrial and metallurgical (冶金的) engineers, partly in respon to the reduced role of manufacturing, a big employer of them. 中国rapper
The decline started in the 1950s, when manufacturing generated a sturdy 28% of the nati卫生防疫站
onal income, or gross domestic product, and employed one-third of the workforce. Today, factory output generates just 12% of G.D.P. and employs barely 9% of the nation's workers.
Mass layoffs and plant closings have drawn plenty of headlines and public debate over the years, and they still occasionally do. But the damage to skill and craftsmanship- that's needed to build a complex airliner or a tractor, or for a worker to move up from asmbler to machinist to supervisor - went largely unnoticed.
正月十五的习俗"In an earlier generation, we lost our connection to the land, and now we are losing our connection to the machinery we depend on," says Michael Hout, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley. "People who work with their hands," he went on, "are doing things today that we call rvice jobs, in restaurants and laundries, or in medical technology and the like."
That's one explanation for the decline in traditional craftsmanship. Lack of interest is another. The big money is in fields like finance. Starting in the 1980s, skill in finance grew 韩国乒乓球
in importance, and, as depicted in the news media and the movies, became a more appealing source of income.
By last year, Wall Street traders, bankers and tho who deal in real estate generated 21% of the national income, double their share in the 1950s. And Warren Buffett, the good-natured financier, became a homespun folk hero, without the tools and overalls (工作服).
"Young people grow up without developing the skills to fix things around the hou," says Richard Curtin, director of the Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers. "They know about computers, of cour, but they don't know how to build them."
