After World War II our ability to engineer and manufacture things was going strong. The needs of the War reguired every sort of technological disipline and American know-how in S.T.E.M. subjects was the most advanced in the world. The acronym S.T.E.M. stands for SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, ENGINEERING, and MATHEMATICS. For a while our superiority was extended by the Cold War with Russian Communism. Our military-industrial complex was a powerful motivator to the study of S.T.E.M. in our educational systems.
When the Cold War ended America began to slide from manufacturing to financing and distributing. Manufacturing declined in the USA and our schools gradually moved from teaching the hard subjects (S.T.E.M.), to teaching softer, more socially oriented classes. Instead of engineering degrees, our colleges and universities put more emphasis on liberal arts and business oriented subjects. We taught our young scholars to be lawyers, bankers, and poets as we discovered that there was more opportunity available for distributors and brokers of goods manufactured in other countries where labor was a smaller component of cost.
By the 1990s we were selling pizzas and fast foods to one another, and selling products made off-shore. We lost our manufacturing superiority in almost every industrial product area. Now, for practical purposes, America has no iron and steel makers, we are down to three car manufacturers (and they are hanging on only because they are supported by federal tax dollars), and there is no watch industry, no television industry, no cell phone industry, and we are down to a very few airplane companies. Even pharmaceutical products, the shoe industry, and a substantial amount of our agricultural needs are supplied by other countries. The list goes on and on.
Apple, the computer manufacturer, recently came out with an advanced cell phone with internet capabilities. They hired engineers from India to develop it and then ordered the manufactured product from China. This manufacturing scheme is typical and wide spread. . . . .and in the long run is the principal cause of America's rapid decline. Yes, America is slowly losing it's exceptional superiority in the world community.
more to come . . .
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