2010/7/12
自由時報社論
聽聽葛洛夫的高見 看看馬英九的騙局
美國經濟大受金融海嘯衝擊，失業率攀升到十％以上，雖然還不能與一九二九年大蕭條時的二 十五％相提並論，卻已讓美國有識之士深感憂心，英特爾（INTEL）創辦人、前執行長安迪．葛洛夫（Andy Grove）就是其中的一位。葛洛夫日前在《彭博商業周刊》指出，當前美國公司的發展策略只重視創新研發，卻將製造部分大量外包到新興國家，因此缺乏規模 提升過程，無法替美國社會創造就業機會。他認為，美國需要一套以就業為核心的經濟理論，需要一個以就業為核心的政治領導者，指導我們的計畫與行動。他甚至 主張，政府應向外包的勞工產品徵收特別稅，專款專用，設置「美國規模提升銀行」，為那些提升美國製造規模的業者提供專款。
平心而論，近百年 來美國穩居世界第一大經濟體的地位，這是人類社會史無前例的成就。近十年來，雖遭逢科技泡沫、反恐戰爭與次貸風暴衝擊，但據世界銀行統計，美國去年國內生 產毛額（ＧＤＰ） 仍以十四兆美元排名世界第一，幾乎是第二名日本五兆美元的三倍，也佔全世界整體ＧＤＰ二成以上，國力甚為可觀。由於「存在就是真理」，所謂將製造部分外包 至新興國家，大幅降低成本，而將創新研發留在國內，提升高附加價值的主張，打著全球化的旗幟，成為美國社會的主流聲音，任何人若是加以挑戰，勢必被貼上保 護主義、本土主義、違反國際分工的標籤，成為背負污名的保守派。
換言之，美國此際固然遭逢一九二九年大蕭條以來最嚴峻的經濟困境，但美國企 業所創造的價值，仍為其他國家所不及，此一現象大大強化製造外包主張的正當性。論者甚至以鴻海富士康員工連環跳為例，指出美國蘋果每僱用一名員工、中國就 有十名員工負責組裝，而且利潤絕大部分歸於蘋果，鴻海富士康只能賺取微薄利潤，充分印證了外包策略的正確性。故而，此刻任何人要跳出來質疑美國企業外包海 外策略，要求增聘國內員工，似乎顯得不識時務，既屬思想落伍，更是政治不正確的傾向，必須具有高道德勇氣。
然而，美國有識之士仍在財政雙赤 字，尤其在失業人口未能下降的現象中，看到了美國經濟的內在危機。葛洛夫指出，今天美國電腦製造業僱用十六萬員工，比一九七五年第一部個人電腦組裝時僱用 員工數還少，而相對的，在亞洲從事電腦製造業的工人、工程師與經理約一百五十萬人。美國科技業國內與國外代工員工的比例，約為十比一，讓某些人沾沾自喜美 國企業全球營運的成功，賺走了利潤大餅的最大塊，普林斯頓大學教授布蘭德（Alan S. Blinder）即以電視機為例，盛讚「電視機不過是一種商品，它們的生產移往海外工資低得多的地方。到今天，美國境內製造的電視機數目為零，這是美國的 挫敗嗎？不，這是美國的勝利。」但是葛洛夫語重心長地指出，「如果我們的社會，除了一些領高薪、做高附加價值的人以外，只有大群的失業人口，這社會又是什 麼社會？」
美國是科技先進、高國民所得、資本主義最發達、全球第一大經濟體，擁有實施企業外包、利用其他工資便宜國家作為生產基地的最佳條 件，卻依然嘗到大量勞工失業的苦果，在美國企業外包已成趨勢下，未來美國藍領，甚至服務業勞工，將逐漸失去他們的工作。反觀台灣，原本就缺乏研發創新與品 牌，產業重心在組裝代工，卻仍發生一九八○年代傳統製造業與九○年代科技業兩波企業外移，將生產基地遷往中國後，造成產業空洞化，嘗到了近二十年經濟在原 地打轉的惡果，歷經李登輝時代「戒急用忍」與陳水扁時代「有效管理」，仍無法擺脫中國的磁吸，如今馬英九執政，不記取教訓，反而變本加厲，一切以中國為 師、為解藥，只會不斷向中國開放，實施三通、直航、觀光，甚至簽下ＥＣＦＡ賣身契，企圖引進中資、中國勞工、中國商品，讓台灣全面淪陷。
對 於陷在高失業率，卻毫無振興產業措施，只會以依賴中國作為解決方案，執意簽署ＥＣＦＡ，意圖將台灣全部綁在中國的馬政府，葛洛夫提出以就業為核心的經濟理 論，就像一面照妖鏡，讓馬政府吹噓ＥＣＦＡ可以救台灣經濟的騙局露出了馬腳。相信葛洛夫若生在台灣，也會站出來反對馬政府向中國傾斜政策，為台灣勞工請 命。
****Andy Grove: How America Can Create Jobs
The former Intel chief says "job-centric" leadership and incentives are needed to expand U.S. domestic employment again
Robyn Twomey
Recently an acquaintance at the next table in a Palo Alto (Calif.) restaurant introduced me to his companions, three young venture capitalists from China. They explained, with visible excitement, that they were touring promising companies in Silicon Valley. I've lived in the Valley a long time, and usually when I see how the region has become such a draw for global investments, I feel a little proud.
Not this time. I left the restaurant unsettled. Something did not add up. Bay Area unemployment is even higher than the 9.7 percent national average. Clearly, the great Silicon Valley innovation machine hasn't been creating many jobs of late—unless you're counting Asia, where American tech companies have been adding jobs like mad for years.
The underlying problem isn't simply lower Asian costs. It's our own misplaced faith in the power of startups to create U.S. jobs. Americans love the idea of the guys in the garage inventing something that changes the world. New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman recently encapsulated this view in a piece called "Start-Ups, Not Bailouts." His argument: Let tired old companies that do commodity manufacturing die if they have to. If Washington really wants to create jobs, he wrote, it should back startups.
Friedman is wrong. Startups are a wonderful thing, but they cannot by themselves increase tech employment. Equally important is what comes after that mythical moment of creation in the garage, as technology goes from prototype to mass production. This is the phase where companies scale up. They work out design details, figure out how to make things affordably, build factories, and hire people by the thousands. Scaling is hard work but necessary to make innovation matter.
The scaling process is no longer happening in the U.S. And as long as that's the case, plowing capital into young companies that build their factories elsewhere will continue to yield a bad return in terms of American jobs.
What Went Wrong?
Scaling used to work well in Silicon Valley. Entrepreneurs came up with an invention. Investors gave them money to build their business. If the founders and their investors were lucky, the company grew and had an initial public offering, which brought in money that financed further growth.
I am fortunate to have lived through one such example. In 1968 two well-known technologists and their investor friends anted up $3 million to start Intel (INTC), making memory chips for the computer industry. From the beginning we had to figure out how to make our chips in volume. We had to build factories, hire, train, and retain employees, establish relationships with suppliers, and sort out a million other things before Intel could become a billion-dollar company. Three years later the company went public and grew to be one of the biggest technology companies in the world. By 1980, 10 years after our IPO, about 13,000 people worked for Intel in the U.S.
Not far from Intel's headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif., other companies developed. Tandem Computers went through a similar process, then Sun Microsystems, Cisco (CSCO), Netscape, and on and on. Some companies died along the way or were absorbed by others, but each survivor added to the complex technological ecosystem that came to be called Silicon Valley.
As time passed, wages and health-care costs rose in the U.S. China opened up. American companies discovered that they could have their manufacturing and even their engineering done more cheaply overseas. When they did so, margins improved. Management was happy, and so were stockholders. Growth continued, even more profitably. But the job machine began sputtering.
The 10X Factor
Today, manufacturing employment in the U.S. computer industry is about 166,000, lower than it was before the first PC, the MITS Altair 2800, was assembled in 1975 (figure-B). Meanwhile, a very effective computer manufacturing industry has emerged in Asia, employing about 1.5 million workers—factory employees, engineers, and managers. The largest of these companies is Hon Hai Precision Industry, also known as Foxconn. The company has grown at an astounding rate, first in Taiwan and later in China. Its revenues last year were $62 billion, larger than Apple (AAPL), Microsoft (MSFT), Dell (DELL), or Intel. Foxconn employs over 800,000 people, more than the combined worldwide head count of Apple, Dell, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Intel, and Sony (SNE) (figure-C).
Until a recent spate of suicides at Foxconn's giant factory complex in Shenzhen, China, few Americans had heard of the company. But most know the products it makes: computers for Dell and HP, Nokia (NOK) cell phones, Microsoft Xbox 360 consoles, Intel motherboards, and countless other familiar gadgets. Some 250,000 Foxconn employees in southern China produce Apple's products. Apple, meanwhile, has about 25,000 employees in the U.S. That means for every Apple worker in the U.S. there are 10 people in China working on iMacs, iPods, and iPhones. The same roughly 10-to-1 relationship holds for Dell, disk-drive maker Seagate Technology (STX), and other U.S. tech companies.
You could say, as many do, that shipping jobs overseas is no big deal because the high-value work—and much of the profits—remain in the U.S. That may well be so. But what kind of a society are we going to have if it consists of highly paid people doing high-value-added work—and masses of unemployed?
Since the early days of Silicon Valley, the money invested in companies has increased dramatically, only to produce fewer jobs. Simply put, the U.S. has become wildly inefficient at creating American tech jobs. We may be less aware of this growing inefficiency, however, because our history of creating jobs over the past few decades has been spectacular—masking our greater and greater spending to create each position. Should we wait and not act on the basis of early indicators? I think that would be a tragic mistake, because the only chance we have to reverse the deterioration is if we act early and decisively.
Already the decline has been marked. It may be measured by way of a simple calculation—an estimate of the employment cost-effectiveness of a company. First, take the initial investment plus the investment during a company's IPO. Then divide that by the number of employees working in that company 10 years later. For Intel this worked out to be about $650 per job—$3,600 adjusted for inflation. National Semiconductor (NSM), another chip company, was even more efficient at $2,000 per job. Making the same calculations for a number of Silicon Valley companies shows that the cost of creating U.S. jobs grew from a few thousand dollars per position in the early years to a hundred thousand dollars today (figure-A). The obvious reason: Companies simply hire fewer employees as more work is done by outside contractors, usually in Asia.
The job machine breakdown isn't just in computers. Consider alternative energy, an emerging industry where there's plenty of innovation. Photovoltaics, for example, are a U.S. invention. Their use in home energy applications was also pioneered by the U.S. Last year, I decided to do my bit for energy conservation and set out to equip my house with solar power. My wife and I talked with four local solar firms. As part of our due diligence, I checked where they get their photovoltaic panels—the key part of the system. All the panels they use come from China. A Silicon Valley company sells equipment used to manufacture photo-active films. They ship close to 10 times more machines to China than to manufacturers in the U.S., and this gap is growing (figure-D). Not surprisingly, U.S. employment in the making of photovoltaic films and panels is perhaps 10,000—just a few percent of estimated worldwide employment.
There's more at stake than exported jobs. With some technologies, both scaling and innovation take place overseas.
Such is the case with advanced batteries. It has taken years and many false starts, but finally we are about to witness mass-produced electric cars and trucks. They all rely on lithium-ion batteries. What microprocessors are to computing, batteries are to electric vehicles. Unlike with microprocessors, the U.S. share of lithium-ion battery production is tiny (figure-E).
That's a problem. A new industry needs an effective ecosystem in which technology knowhow accumulates, experience builds on experience, and close relationships develop between supplier and customer. The U.S. lost its lead in batteries 30 years ago when it stopped making consumer electronics devices. Whoever made batteries then gained the exposure and relationships needed to learn to supply batteries for the more demanding laptop PC market, and after that, for the even more demanding automobile market. U.S. companies did not participate in the first phase and consequently were not in the running for all that followed. I doubt they will ever catch up.
The Key to Job Creation
Scaling isn't easy. The investments required are much higher than in the invention phase. And funds need to be committed early, when not much is known about the potential market. Another example from Intel: The investment to build a silicon manufacturing plant in the '70s was a few million dollars. By the early '90s the cost of the factories that would be able to produce the new Pentium chips in volume rose to several billion dollars. The decision to build these plants needed to be made years before we knew whether the Pentium chip would work or whether the market would be interested in it.
Lessons we learned from previous missteps helped us. Some years earlier, when Intel's business consisted of making memory chips, we hesitated to add manufacturing capacity, not being all that sure about the market demand in years to come. Our Japanese competitors didn't hesitate: They built the plants. When the demand for memory chips exploded, the Japanese roared into the U.S. market and Intel began its descent as a memory chip supplier. Despite being steeled by that experience, I still remember how afraid I was as I asked the Intel directors for authorization to spend billions of dollars for factories to produce a product that did not exist at the time for a market we could not size. Fortunately, they gave their O.K. even as they gulped. The bet paid off.
My point isn't that Intel was brilliant. The company was founded at a time when it was easier to scale domestically. For one thing, China wasn't yet open for business. More importantly, the U.S. had not yet forgotten that scaling was crucial to its economic future.
How could the U.S. have forgotten? I believe the answer has to do with a general undervaluing of manufacturing—the idea that as long as "knowledge work" stays in the U.S., it doesn't matter what happens to factory jobs. It's not just newspaper commentators who spread this idea. Consider this passage by Princeton University economist Alan S. Blinder: "The TV manufacturing industry really started here, and at one point employed many workers. But as TV sets became 'just a commodity,' their production moved offshore to locations with much lower wages. And nowadays the number of television sets manufactured in the U.S. is zero. A failure? No, a success."
I disagree. Not only did we lose an untold number of jobs, we broke the chain of experience that is so important in technological evolution. As happened with batteries, abandoning today's "commodity" manufacturing can lock you out of tomorrow's emerging industry.
Wanted: Job-Centric Economics
Our fundamental economic beliefs, which we have elevated from a conviction based on observation to an unquestioned truism, is that the free market is the best of all economic systems—the freer the better. Our generation has seen the decisive victory of free-market principles over planned economies. So we stick with this belief, largely oblivious to emerging evidence that while free markets beat planned economies, there may be room for a modification that is even better.
Such evidence stares at us from the performance of several Asian countries in the past few decades. These countries seem to understand that job creation must be the No. 1 objective of state economic policy. The government plays a strategic role in setting the priorities and arraying the forces and organization necessary to achieve this goal. The rapid development of the Asian economies provides numerous illustrations. In a thorough study of the industrial development of East Asia, Robert Wade of the London School of Economics found that these economies turned in precedent-shattering economic performances over the '70s and '80s in large part because of the effective involvement of the government in targeting the growth of manufacturing industries.
Consider the "Golden Projects," a series of digital initiatives driven by the Chinese government in the late 1980s and 1990s. Beijing was convinced of the importance of electronic networks—used for transactions, communications, and coordination—in enabling job creation, particularly in the less developed parts of the country. Consequently, the Golden Projects enjoyed priority funding. In time they contributed to the rapid development of China's information infrastructure and the country's economic growth.
How do we turn such Asian experience into intelligent action here and now? Long term, we need a job-centric economic theory—and job-centric political leadership—to guide our plans and actions. In the meantime, consider some basic thoughts from a onetime factory guy.
Silicon Valley is a community with a strong tradition of engineering, and engineers are a peculiar breed. They are eager to solve whatever problems they encounter. If profit margins are the problem, we go to work on margins, with exquisite focus. Each company, ruggedly individualistic, does its best to expand efficiently and improve its own profitability. However, our pursuit of our individual businesses, which often involves transferring manufacturing and a great deal of engineering out of the country, has hindered our ability to bring innovations to scale at home. 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.
The story comes to mind of an engineer who was to be executed by guillotine. The guillotine was stuck, and custom required that if the blade didn't drop, the condemned man was set free. Before this could happen, the engineer pointed with excitement to a rusty pulley, and told the executioner to apply some oil there. Off went his head.
We got to our current state as a consequence of many of us taking actions focused on our own companies' next milestones. An example: Five years ago a friend joined a large VC firm as a partner. His responsibility was to make sure that all the startups they funded had a "China strategy," meaning a plan to move what jobs they could to China. He was going around with an oil can, applying drops to the guillotine in case it was stuck. We should put away our oil cans. VCs should have a partner in charge of every startup's "U.S. strategy."
The first task is to rebuild our industrial commons. We should develop a system of financial incentives: Levy an extra tax on the product of offshored labor. (If the result is a trade war, treat it like other wars—fight to win.) Keep that money separate. Deposit it in the coffers of what we might call the Scaling Bank of the U.S. and make these sums available to companies that will scale their American operations. Such a system would be a daily reminder that while pursuing our company goals, all of us in business have a responsibility to maintain the industrial base on which we depend and the society whose adaptability—and stability—we may have taken for granted.
I fled Hungary as a young man in 1956 to come to the U.S. Growing up in the Soviet bloc, I witnessed first-hand the perils of both government overreach and a stratified population. Most Americans probably aren't aware that there was a time in this country when tanks and cavalry were massed on Pennsylvania Avenue to chase away the unemployed. It was 1932; thousands of jobless veterans were demonstrating outside the White House. Soldiers with fixed bayonets and live ammunition moved in on them, and herded them away from the White House. In America! Unemployment is corrosive. If what I'm suggesting sounds protectionist, so be it.
Every day, that Palo Alto restaurant where I met the Chinese venture capitalists is full of technology executives and entrepreneurs. Many of them are my friends. I understand the technological challenges they face, along with the financial pressure they're under from directors and shareholders. Can we expect them to take on yet another assignment, to work on behalf of a loosely defined community of companies, employees, and employees yet to be hired? To do so is undoubtedly naïve. Yet the imperative for change is real and the choice is simple. If we want to remain a leading economy, we change on our own, or change will continue to be forced upon us.
Andy Grove, senior adviser to Intel, was the company's chief executive officer or chairman from 1987 until 2005.
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