The issue is compensation, not making stuff. So I reject that premise.

However he is quite right that if you want to make world-class stuff, you don't farm it out around the planet to the cheapest vendor, you do it in house and build on the experience and know-how of your own people. Highly trained and experienced workers are not fungible, and that's what you need, not a CEO with a big ego.

If you want innovation, you have to make stuff. If you make stuff, you also make jobs for lower middle class and middle class people. If you don't make stuff, you don't have jobs. With the exception of intellectually demanding jobs like teaching, pure research, law or medicine, service jobs are not middle-class jobs. Never have been; never will be. We can't all be doctors and lawyers and teachers.

He is right that the technological innovation comes out of the manufacturing sector.
The universities and research institutes can provide the basic knowledge and research, but the practical applications that improve our lives grow out of manufacturing. In modern times, there is no way to have a society with economic growth that is meaningful and shared by all unless you have manufacturing.

The change from the Middle Ages to the modern society was due to the growth of tradesmen who made things that could be sold or exchanged on markets and then the commerce that arose from the creative output of the tradesmen.

Nobody knows where innovation comes from, but it's not the product of dogmatic statements like: "If you want innovation, you have to make stuff". The lower middle class comes from lower middle class jobs, with lower middle class pay. I was raised lower middle class, they can be anybody. Lot's of government jobs are lower middle class jobs. Didn't used to be, but boy they are now.

They don't have to be manufacturing jobs, there is no necessary connection, that is just an artifact of how our economy developed. We can do what we like, and it can work if we get it right. Any highly skilled but not "creative" work will do fine. We need to get away from consumerism anyway, we are fucking the planet over for rubbish.

with stuff. And that is what people do in factories when they want to find a way to save time or to produce a cheaper, better product. And that doesn't happen without manufacturing. I knit and sew, etc. When you try to make things, you try to learn and figure out new ways to do it, new materials you can use and that makes for innovation. I don't innovate new processes, but I think up new ways I can do things better and new colors, etc. to make things I make better. Innovation is an integral part of doing -- but you have to have and be doing things to have good innovation.

What Bill Gates knows is marketing, and marketing is not innovation.

Edit: And THAT is why Windows has been the dominant OS for a couple decade, despite being a slow, clumsy, and inefficient operating system. I cannot remember ever coming across a good "innovative" well-done MIcrosoft product since the early versions of Word. They all are littered with marketing bells and whistles and are slow and buggy. But boy can he sell them, and he really knows how to play the vulture capitalism game too. What Bill Gates does is stifle innovation to make money.

innovate. In fact, the idea that Gates himself was not an innovator makes me agree with his analysis all the more. To succeed in sales, he had to have a market worth selling. That means he had an eye or a sense for a good product. He looked at a lot of products and was offered a lot of opportunities to invest. He knows a great deal, probably more than anyone about who produced the best products and what went into their inventiveness. I'll bet that he found that the best innovators were people who played with mechanical or computer things. We have one in our family. I agree with Gates. Manufacturing seeds innovation. Without it forget the innovation. I think that despite your dislike of Gates which I can understand, you would probably agree.

And neither does being mass-produced. That just means they think they can sell it. The would sell anything if the money is right.

Profitable is not innovative and it is not quality either.

We are awash in best-selling "revolutionary" crap that will be obsolete in a few years. That is not quality, or innovation, but it is very profitable.

Yes, it's all very esoteric. However, we've observed difference in the opportunities for regular working people under a manufacturing based economy and a service based economy, and workers fair far worse under the latter. Perhaps, at some other time, and some other place, workers could actually do better under a service based economy.

But they don't in the here-and-now.

So if you want to argue that workers could or that they might do as well or better in a service based economy, it is incumbent upon you to explain what changes could possibly make this so.

Because it ain't happening in the here-and-now.

Mind you, I'm not opposed to manufacturing, I'll concede he has a point there, you do have to make things too, you can't just rely on service jobs either, what you really need is diversity, many small companies, attacking many problems, in many ways, not a few big ones pursuing the big bucks. But innovation comes from people in all sorts of walks of life, in all sorts of jobs, it's not just about making widgets.

What are you basing this theory on? Is this some of Utopianism? Because, again, it reads like what you *wish* were the case, more than a reflection of reality for American workers in 2013.

You think innovation comes from a select few, in a few walks of life, in special jobs, that make only widgets? And you say I have no evidence?

R+D... No D without R...

He has made some mis-steps, but the guy and his wife are the far most rich givers of our age.

Although I do believe they have good intentions.

Services also are going to suffer from job losses due to increasing automation and artificial intelligence.

... during his entire reign at Microsoft?

Did he innovate the Graphical User Interface? No, that was Xerox PARC.
Did he innovate the Local Area Network? No, that was Novell.
Did he innovate the Internet Browser? No, he said the internet was inconsequential and then had to play catch up by buying someone else's (crappy ass and still crappy after 20 years) browser.
Did he innovate the Smart Phone? Not a chance.

Gates made his company and his fortune by being a ruthless dick and fucking over everyone is his path. I wouldn't take his advice on how to clean a toilet.

Oh, and he didn't buy the browser, as in pay for the work somebody else did, he just stole it. Then, because of the family connections, he had to pay back almost 10% of the worth of what he stole and make some hefty, quick-before-the-ruling-comes-back "campaign contributions".

innovators in our era took already create items and made new uses for them. You mentioned a lot of pieces, Gates put them together as a whole that proved to be very useful to billions of people - THAT, my friend, IS innovation. I am no Microsoft lover, I hate that it doesn't make new versions of software accept Apps that were built for earlier versions of software.

... you do.

And gets people off on Gates-lovin' or Gates-hatin' tangents.

Smil also notes that the two European economies that seem to be doing well are the German and the Swiss, both of which have strong apprentice programs for manufacturing workers.

And he says the planet could feed 10 billion people, if we ate much less meat.

It is the "innovation and a middle class come only from manufacturing" argument that I disagree with.

The British went through this service economy transition in the 60s and 70s and it wasn't pretty, but it was the failure to innovate that lost them those manufacturing jobs, and US competition, not the failure to manufacture causing them to become dull. (We were still pretty competitive back then, still are not bad now when we think about something besides money. Remember Apollo? The internet? That's innovation, and that was not done by the likes of Gates.)

These were the currencies of countries that made (industrial) stuff worth buying. That's why the currencies had value beyond their borders.

People in some developing countries used to call their currency "coconut money" because you couldn't buy major manufactured goods (like cars) with it (you could only buy local food and goods).

because owners didn't use some of their profits to innovate. One of the downsides to innovation is that less humans will be needed to make products, but, if managed properly, that end is far better than industry going away with people then being relegated to dead end, low wage jobs.

to legalize theft on a national scale. From labor laws to the tax code, the parasite class spent tens of millions and decades getting their agenda through, and they readily bought members from both sides of the isle until they had enough influence to bypass the middlemen and buy the parties.

looked to skim off as much money as possible for mansions, big boats and other trivial bullshit.