Intel's Andy Grove on importance of manufacturing - what a great read!

I'm a fan of Intel founder Andy Grove (and coincidentally I'm currently an investor also!). But I was very impressed with Mr. Grove's article about the importance of manufacturing - and the importance of keeping even low skill jobs to maintain a presence in the evolving knowledgebase of future new technologies, but also to simply provide employment as an end in-and-of-itself.

Without scaling, we don’t just lose jobs -- we lose our hold on new technologies. Losing the ability to scale will ultimately damage our capacity to innovate.

In a sense he's saying you can't have the high skill jobs without bringing along the low skill jobs too. In effect - you need alot of low skilled jobs so you can know enough and be innovative enough to be involved in the next big thing. There's alot of value in doing things on a very large scale - and we lose alot of know-how by farming so much of it out overseas to lower cost producers.

This definitely flies in the face of prevailing economics, but there's a cohesion to his argument that has some resonating qualities. I found this perspective definitely worth the read.