On 26 October the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) published its plan for fighting a techno-economic war. Robert Atkinson proposes four new bodies, led by an industrial agency first floated in 2021, and an economy-wide net assessment. To staff them he wants a new cadre: productionists.
The diagnosis holds
ITIF’s best point is the plainest. There is an office to approach on monetary policy, defence or health, and none on whether the United States can still make machine tools, displays or measuring instruments. Its statistics, built after 1946, tell whether the economy is overheating, not whether an industry is slipping. ITIF calls the missing level mesoeconomics, between the firm and the economy, and the analysts who would read it productionists.
London reached the same diagnosis the same day. More than ninety Labour MPs warned the Prime Minister that the state has become less knowledgeable about the economy, and asked for reindustrialisation to be run from No 10 North under a named minister, with its own Act and fund. As in Washington, nobody in the structure is employed to say whether the plant will run.
The syllabus
ITIF then lists what a productionist must understand. The list runs to twenty-nine items: the experience curve, the growth-share matrix, barriers to entry, economies of scope and scale, network effects, first-mover advantage and modularity. It is a sound strategy syllabus. Execution appears once, as a topic to weigh against strategy. Engineering appears in the proposed graduate programme as a subject to be informed about.
The list says nothing about whether a process is in control, what yield a line holds at rate, how long a second site takes to match the first site’s scrap, or who on the floor knows why a fixture is shimmed. The word chosen for the role is telling. A productionist holds a view about production, as an economist holds one about markets. The discipline that does the work already exists and already has a name. Washington has coined a noun so that it does not have to hire the verb. Thinking without doing is analysis. Doing and thinking together is agency, and ITIF has designed an agency without it.
The list also stops at the factory gate. It leaves out the work organisation that turns technology into output, and the delays and feedback that decide how a ramp behaves. Trist and Bamforth showed in British coal mines in 1951 that better equipment in an unchanged organisation can fail to deliver the output it was bought for. Forrester built system dynamics in 1961 from the hiring swings at a General Electric appliance plant. A productionist trained on this syllabus would fund the equipment and miss the system.
| Atkinson / ITIF list, verbatim | Productionist | Manufacturing Engineer | Modern Industrialist |
|---|---|---|---|
| Choices of technology leapfrogging | partly | covers | covers |
| Overcoming latecomer disadvantages | partly | covers | covers |
| Role of market-share building | covers | does not cover | covers |
| Fixed costs and variable costs and impacts on marginal costs | covers | covers | covers |
| Economies of scope and scale | covers | partly | covers |
| Importance of execution vs. strategy | partly | covers | covers |
| Sources of competitive advantage (price, quality, customization, innovation) | covers | partly | covers |
| Incremental vs. disruptive innovation | covers | partly | covers |
| Organizational culture and resistance to disruptive innovation | partly | partly | covers |
| Turnaround strategies vs. sustaining | covers | partly | covers |
| Experience curve and learning curve | partly | covers | covers |
| Growth-share matrix | covers | does not cover | partly |
| Cost advantage vs. differentiation | covers | partly | covers |
| Barriers to entry | covers | partly | covers |
| Product life cycle and commodification | covers | partly | covers |
| Market growth rates | covers | does not cover | partly |
| Sustaining vs. disruptive innovation | covers | partly | covers |
| Industry positioning | covers | does not cover | covers |
| Market scope (local, national, global) | covers | partly | covers |
| Kinds of innovation (product, process, business model) | partly | covers | covers |
| Kinds of competition (dynamic vs. static) | covers | does not cover | partly |
| Industry externalities | covers | partly | partly |
| Network effects | covers | does not cover | partly |
| Agglomeration (localization and urbanization) | covers | partly | covers |
| First mover vs. latecomer advantages | covers | partly | covers |
| Threat of entry and barriers to entry | covers | partly | covers |
| Expected retaliation from incumbent | covers | does not cover | partly |
| Substitutability | covers | partly | partly |
| Modularity | partly | covers | covers |
| Kaipability list, not limited to these | |||
| The floor | |||
| How long until the second site matches the first site’s scrap rate? | does not cover | covers | covers |
| Does the process hold tolerance at rate, on every shift? | does not cover | covers | partly |
| Can the know-how be rebuilt once the people who held it have gone? | does not cover | covers | partly |
| Who on the floor knows why the fixture is shimmed? | does not cover | covers | partly |
| Which tier of the supply base can actually hold the drawing? | does not cover | covers | partly |
| The system: socio-technical | |||
| Was the work organisation redesigned along with the equipment? | does not cover | partly | covers |
| Is variation controlled where it starts, by the people who run the line? | does not cover | partly | covers |
| Can the operators run it without the people who designed it? | does not cover | covers | covers |
| The system: system dynamics | |||
| Where do delays in hiring, training and supply turn a ramp into boom and bust? | does not cover | partly | covers |
| How far does a swing in demand grow as it passes up the supply chain? | partly | partly | covers |
| Fully covered, ITIF list | 22 of 29 | 7 of 29 | 22 of 29 |
| Fully covered, Kaipability list | 0 of 10 | 6 of 10 | 6 of 10 |
Two verbs, not twenty-nine nouns. The rows off the list are not limited to these, and adding more is the wrong debate. Manufacturing Engineering is a flywheel of two verbs: manufacturing the engineering, and engineering the manufacturing. It decides what the nouns are, not the other way round.
Productionist · noun, holds a view
ITIF’s term for the analysts who would staff its National Economic Security Council: “analysts with a deep understanding of firm, industry and technology dynamics.” A view about production, as an economist holds one about markets. Kaipability has no lexicon entry for it.
Manufacturing Engineer · verb + verb, two verbs compounded
Bridges a working prototype and a production system delivering quality, repeatability and yield at scale. Not an R&D scientist. The discipline is two verbs, compounded: manufacturing the engineering, and engineering the manufacturing.
Modern Industrialist · noun + verb, owns the asset and builds it
Treats industrial capability as the asset to build and own, accountable to repeatable real-world outcome, not activity or IP.
coverspartlydoes not coverThe list is Atkinson’s. The marks are our reading.
China has no job called productionist either. In Xi’an the Manufacturing Engineer and the Industrialist get the carpet. In the West it goes to entertainers only.
What net assessment counted
Net assessment worked at the Pentagon because the thing it assessed could be counted and tested: fleets, inventories, orders of battle, exercises. Industrial power has an inventory as well, but the part that decides outcomes is the hardest to see. The report names it: the industrial commons, meaning the know-how spread across machine builders, toolmakers, metrologists and process engineers.
That know-how does not show up in the Census Bureau’s manufacturing surveys, in trade data or in a SWOT matrix. He argues that data on robotics investment, factory size and supply chains is not available, and collecting it would help. Installed equipment is still a count of what was bought. Capability, the ability to repeat, is built, and it is only visible to people who have built it.
Deals, then strategy, then nothing
Atkinson warns that the Pentagon’s new Economic Defense Unit may do deals instead of strategy. NAITA, modelled on a credit agency, risks the same failure one stage later: strategy instead of making. Finance and analysis both sit upstream of the point where money turns into producing plant, and that conversion is where public programmes stall. Atkinson notes that the CHIPS Act funded an industry and still left the country without a semiconductor strategy. A strategy without a readiness test would fail in the next stage down.
What the other side got right
China’s leadership was long drawn from people trained to build things. Jiang Zemin trained as an electrical engineer and Hu Jintao as a hydraulic engineer. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology treats production as something to understand from the inside. Whatever view one takes of the system, its planners could read a plant. The West’s planners can read a balance sheet. Atkinson’s design adds a third skill, reading a sector, and still leaves the plant out.
China has no job called productionist either. It has not needed one. Go to Xi’an and the words for Engineer and Industrialist are known and respected; the carpet is rolled out for the people who carry them. In the West they get the car park. Whether the West returns that honour is a question of decades. At this rate, perhaps twenty years.
The sixth division
NAITA’s chart has five divisions: data and analysis, advanced industry, emerging technologies, innovation systems and coordination. It needs a sixth, a readiness division staffed by Manufacturing Engineers and Modern Industrialists, who between them read the plant and the system around it. That division would rate, before the money moves and after it lands, whether a funded programme can make the thing again at rate, at cost, and by people who did not design it. Without it, the gap is a governance failure, not a shortage of engineering advice.
Manufacturing Engineers qualify processes. They bring a second site up to the first. They audit a supply base down to the tier where the shortage actually starts. They tell a funder whether a demonstrator is a production route or a one-off. In Britain the public version of this function has a working name, ARCA, a Readiness and Capability Agency, and the private version already exists.
Kaipability works at that interface for investors and industrials, giving an independent view of whether a thing can be made at rate and at cost before capital commits.
If your programme has a strategy and no gauge, we should talk.
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