Chapter 2: Producers

We have a name for people who take freedom, saved earnings, hard work, raw materials and ingenuity and create something new and worthy. We have a name for people whose skills and products we cannot do without. We call them Producers.

A recent US Bureau of Labor Statistics report ^[2] shows that there are about 22 million goods-producing workers. There are about 110 million service-providing workers. Most all of the first group and a good percentage of the second group are Producers.

I think you intuitively understand my meaning, but let me illustrate with a few examples of Producers. These are people who take raw materials (physical, information, knowledge) and apply them to the solution of some problem. These “raw materials” may even be the work output of other Producers. The result is a product or service that is useful and betters man’s lot in the universe. I might widen the definition to include products that are not so useful today, but may become so in the future. (Some Producers are born way before their time.)

The easy examples are craftsmen (also including women in all that follows) who take a lump of wood, clay, glass, or metal and produce a useful object. Factory workers apply their skills to create quality products, and most of them use their experience and trained eyes and ears to ensure that the quality level remains high. 

Other examples are people who take information as a raw material and craft it into more usable forms, like authors and the people who guide computers in the creation of Internet search engines and databases. Software engineers and technicians also qualify as Producers. Graphic and others artists who create beauty out of nothing, or even solid rock, are Producers.

Scientists who examine nature and reduce its complexity to more easily understood theories also are Producers. Sometimes they know not what raw materials they are working with until they make a breakthrough. Theirs is a world of groping darkness and blinding flashes of intuition and revelation, but they are producing all the while.

Applied science professionals such as engineers of all kinds take the theories and discoveries of scientists and create products and infrastructure that enable our lives to be better. Medical practitioners also take the discoveries of science and apply them to provide us with longer and higher quality lives. In the abstract, psychologists take observations of human beings and create workable notions of how our minds work, sane or otherwise, and create treatments for the mentally ill and the rest of us who are probably mentally ill but won’t turn in our cell phones and car keys!

Not all producers work at the edge of knowledge. Stay-at-home mothers and fathers are Producers, creating the next generation of adults to whom we will pass our world. Their work is very important. Their raw material is their children, and they craft them into responsible people, we hope, learning as they go, doing the most difficult job on the planet: Parenting!

You see that Producers cut a wide swath through the working world of America and the world.