Sorry, but that article is almost entirely wrong. He's basing it on the assumption that the only way to build prosperity is to manufacture stuff and since we manufacture only a fraction of what we did during the 60s, we're doomed. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Case in point: Apple. This is arguably the most successful company on the planet today. Guess how much they manufacture? Nada, zilch, nothing! How come they can make so much money? Because they've focused on the high-value services in the process of getting iPhones and iPads to the consumers. Assembling electronics is relatively low-paid, low-skilled work, so Apple has realized that they don't want to deal with that. Instead, they do the things that nobody else can do, i.e. inventing and designing cool stuff, and charge people good money for it. And that's obviously a VERY successful business model.
There are two basic ways you can make money:
1) Take a natural resource (oil, coal, ore, wood or whatever it may be) out of nature and sell it.
2) Refine a natural resource by building cars, computers and RC planes from them.
What we tend to forget is that designing and inventing things to make from the ore and silicon are very much part of the refinement and tend to be the best paid jobs in that chain.
So why is the US and Europe in a hole right now? Not because we're not manufacturing based, but because our economy is and has been consumption-based rather than production based. What drives the US economy is how much we spend and we artificially inject money into the system to keep spending. We need to start producing again. But producing doesn't necessarily equate manufacturing. It's perfectly fine to invent things, let someone who can do it cheaper build it, and then sell it with a healthy profit. What you produced was the value of the brain power it took to invent and design it. It's perfectly OK to do that!
There's one catch, though: In order to do that you need a well educated workforce. Here in the US, we're constantly falling behind the rest of the world when it comes to educations. And that, my friends, is the main challenge we and our children are facing.
