The Lost Culture of Building

The United States is beginning to rebuild its industrial base. Factories are opening, supply chains are being reshored, and investment is returning to production. Reindustrialization is a necessary but overdue shift, yet beneath the progress is a quieter issue that receives less attention. Reindustrialization is not only an economic project. It is also a cultural one.

For decades, the country moved away from a culture of building. We outsourced production and changed the story we told ourselves about what kind of work is worthwhile. This story once linked pride, skill, and contribution to tangible creation. Over time, it was replaced by a narrative that success meant distance from physical products. The result was a slow erosion of the foundation that allows an industrial ecosystem to function.

I often describe that foundation as a form of ‘soft infrastructure.’ It includes the shared beliefs, informal incentives, and identity systems that shape how people behave within a system. Successful soft infrastructure draws people into industrial work because they see purpose and dignity in it. When it weakens, even an industrial ecosystem with capital and technology will underperform.

Several cultural narratives have contributed to this misalignment. One idea is that industrial work is a step down rather than a path for builders. Another is the belief that America should design while others produce. A third is the assumption that abstract market efficiency was superior to national resilience. Each encouraged a narrow view of ‘progress’ that distanced the nation from its industrial future. Together, they weakened the connection between learning, making, and meaning.

During my own training as an industrial engineer, I spent only one required credit hour inside a machine shop lab. Most of my education centered on spreadsheets, statistical models, and optimization problems. We learned to represent factories through simulation software, but not to understand how they actually run. The workforce pipeline that produced engineers was distanced from the systems we were meant to improve. It was a quiet marker of how the culture of engineering has changed. The older image of the engineer as a builder had faded, replaced by the expectation to manage and optimize from afar. Beneath it was a broader story that equated distance with status, that treated thinking and making as separate domains rather than parts of the same craft.

Reindustrialization requires a shift in narrative. The country needs to recover a sense of identity around the act of building. Industrial work must be reframed as a respected career of agency and creativity. Design and production should be understood as parts of a recursive system, not separate worlds. Reindustrialization requires aligning culture around resilience, iterative learning, and adaptation, rather than one that equates efficiency with success.

Factories, policies, and investment are needed for reindustrialization. But to animate the workforce it requires, reindustrialization needs culture that restores meaning and dignity to the act of building.