Rich Mintz  

Marketing consultant and woodworker Greg Payette wants to bring back American manufacturing — and given that I know he’s a New England boy, I’m sure his first concern is states like Connecticut and Rhode Island, which had a 150-year run as manufacturing centers but are finding it hard to compete nowadays. Or take New Jersey, which spent over a century making everything under the sun (remember “Trenton Makes, the World Takes”?). From Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, I think I learned more about the history of the glove industry in Newark than I know about industries like printing and advertising, which I actually work on the fringes of.

Making things with the hands provides a different kind of pride than you get from making things with the brain (or from managing other people, from afar, who are making things with their hands). Handcrafting — even in the context of a factory assembly line — gives you an indisputable sense of accomplishment. You can argue about whether your novel is finished or whether your painting is good enough, but once your factory has produced a pallet of Johnson rods, they’re done, no question — and you did it. The analogy from my own professional life is direct mail (as compared to online fundraising and other channels that don’t produce anything tangible). Mail is physical, it has a look and a feel and a smell, and the responses pile up in a heap where they can be visually assessed and counted and held in the hand. I miss that sometimes.

I don’t want to handwave about the ease of “bringing manufacturing back,” or even about whether it’s feasible to an old-timey degree, in a globalized economy driven by the pursuit of tiny incremental efficiencies. But wherever it is feasible (due to some accident of geographic protectionism, or a tiny quality advantage that the market is willing to support, or just a bullheaded determination to buy local), it should be encouraged — because in leaving behind the old-fashioned ways of making physical things, we’ve left behind something psychological, too.

Tags: business

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