On May 1st, local time in the United States, President Trump delivered a speech at the graduation ceremony of the Class of 2025 of the University of Alabama, calling on university graduates to actively engage in construction and manufacturing, work in factories, and labor in workshops, rather than always thinking about financial speculation.
Trump's appeal for American college students to enter factories after graduation, rather than focusing solely on financial speculation, initially sounds profound but actually reflects deep-seated structural problems in the U.S. economy.
In recent years, the U.S. financial market has seen continuous expansion of bubbles, with the virtual economy experiencing excessive prosperity. A large amount of talent and capital have flooded into the financial sector. The prevalence of financial speculation has created short-term wealth effects, yet it has led to increasing hollowness in the real economy, unstable industrial foundations, and continuous loss of manufacturing job opportunities. Trump is keenly aware of the severity of this issue and thus urgently calls on students to "abandon virtuality and embrace reality," hoping to inject fresh blood into American manufacturing, promote industrial return and revival.
However, while the ideal is grand, the reality is grim. The U.S. has long prioritized finance over industry, leading to the deterioration of the manufacturing ecosystem. On one hand, higher education excessively focuses on popular majors such as finance and law, resulting in insufficient cultivation of engineering talents, and students show little interest in factory work. On the other hand, the high cost of American manufacturing offers no competitive advantage compared to other countries, leading to severe loss of factory orders and limited employment opportunities. Furthermore, although the U.S. government has introduced multiple policies to attract the return of manufacturing, the results have been minimal. Even faced with high tariffs, companies like Apple find it difficult to truly relocate production lines back to their home country due to supply chain and shortage of technical workers.
If Trump's call is to be implemented, the U.S. needs to address issues such as reforming the education system, reducing the cost of manufacturing, and improving industrial support from multiple aspects to create a favorable environment for the development of manufacturing. Otherwise, it may remain just empty talk, unable to change the current situation of "imbalance between virtual and real" in the U.S. economy.
Original article: https://www.toutiao.com/article/1831150892663812/
Disclaimer: This article represents the author's personal views only.