From 1930 to 1980, the U.S. economy grew at a very fast pace. The average rate of growth of the national domestic product was around 28 percent a year. For those 50 years, our nation held the top spot in all sorts of industrial products and exported heavily. We carried a positive balance of payment, and the current debt of $16 trillion and the possibility of default was a faraway nightmare scenario.

From 1930 to 1980, the U.S. economy grew at a very fast pace. The average rate of growth of the national domestic product was around 28 percent a year. For those 50 years, our nation held the top spot in all sorts of industrial products and exported heavily. We carried a positive balance of payment, and the current debt of $16 trillion and the possibility of default was a faraway nightmare scenario.



Starting around the 1980s, the so-called service economy began to rise; at the same time, the manufacturing industry began rapidly shrinking, and now the United States offers negligible manufacturing output. As our manufacturing declined, the income gap between the rich and the poor increased, leading to today's situation where 1 percent of the population controls an outsized proportion of the nation's wealth, while 99 percent of the population struggles to make ends meet.



Being an engineer, I started to wonder if there are similar situations in fields other than finance. Once I started to look, I found that the gap between haves and have-nots extends into virtually every aspect of American life. For the purposes of this column, I plan to focus on the knowledge gap that exists when it comes to technology, innovation and engineering. Take the computer industry for example. About 3 million people, roughly 1 percent of the U.S. population, are involved in research, design and manufacturing of computers. Here, too, the elite 1 percent dictate to the 99 percent. We buy whatever device we are told we need, complete with incomprehensible booklets on how to fully use the product. There is no text-writing standard to guide us 99-percenters.



Technical writers, who obviously belong to the 1 percent in their respective industry, seem content that we 99-percenters must accept what they write and dictate, and consider that to be the end of the matter. Try calling their 800 number. You know what that is like.



If 99-percenters were treated with better care and respect, we could create a rising consciousness about science and technology, have fewer people who hate technology, and revive interest in manufacturing activities. That is the theme of this series of weekly articles.



Readers are encouraged to maintain clippings of the articles, as they will eventually form a convenient handbook as a reference.



Next week: How to invent



Since I have been an inventor all my life, I will write about what one should do to invent. Invention is a powerful driver of industrial manufacturing activities, and the more people (99-percenters, that is) who focus their energies and intellect on inventing, the better off our regional economy will be. The articles will appear in Business Monday and will explore the invention process, legal and intellectual property issues and finally manufacturing process.



Shintaro (Sam) Asano, who speaks and writes English as a second language, was named by MIT in 2011 as one of the 10 most influential inventors of the 20th century who improved our lives. He is a businessman and a current inventor in the field of electronics and mechanical systems, who is credited as the original inventor of today's portable fax machine. He also developed a data tablet used in the retail point-of-sale to capture customer signatures when credit cards are used.