Lewis: You can never go back
Having just graduated from college with an engineering degree, I took my first job working for Digital Equipment Corporation in Colorado Springs. This facility designed and manufactured storage (mostly disk drives) for large companies. At the time, we were working on the world’s first 1GB disk drive — yes, 1 Gigabyte. It would ultimately sell for over $100,000. By comparison, today you can get a 12 Terabyte drive for $175, which equates to roughly a penny per GB (0.0145). Think of the inverse of egg pricing, on steroids.
After a few months, it came time to take my first business trip to headquarters, which was located in rural Massachusetts. My group admin made all the arrangements. I didn’t drive or even take a car service to the airport. I just drove to the office, where a helicopter picked me up and flew me directly to Denver Airport. I didn’t wait in any lines or even enter the terminal — a car picked me up on the tarmac and drove me straight to the plane. I boarded and sat in first class on a DC-10, where they even had a piano bar.
Once I landed, another helicopter whisked me away to my hotel 30 miles away. No battling Boston traffic. I was in awe of the extravagance. I was just a low-level engineer — and yet this was my reality.
As you might imagine, this level of extravagance ended only a couple of years later as competition heated up and market realities set in. Soon, the helicopters were gone, and coach tickets became the norm. As much as we loved the perks, they would never return.
No amount of nostalgia would bring them back. The world had changed — and so had business.
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Today, I hear politicians promising that tariffs and economic barriers will somehow restore “the good old days” of American manufacturing. They assure us that if we just slap enough tariffs on imported goods, high-paying factory jobs will reappear, and everything will be as it once was.
It’s a comforting story — but it’s fiction.
First, we simply don’t have the workers. Manufacturing jobs that paid middle-class wages in the 1970s and ’80s were supported by a huge labor pool — often high school graduates who could easily slot into assembly lines. Today, the number of working-age Americans without a college degree is shrinking. Fewer people are willing — or able — to work in traditional factories, especially when service jobs, gig work, or remote tech jobs offer higher pay and more flexibility.
Second, we are part of a global economy now. Pretending we can pay $40 an hour for low-skill manufacturing work in the U.S. while competing against factories in Vietnam, India, or Mexico — where labor costs are a fraction — is pure fantasy. Even if tariffs raise prices enough to make U.S. production “competitive,” it will be the American consumer who ultimately pays that tax. A tariff isn’t a free lunch. It’s just a different kind of bill.
Even worse, automation has changed the very nature of manufacturing. Many of the jobs politicians promise to “bring back” no longer exist in any meaningful way. Modern factories are filled with robots and require fewer human workers — and those workers need specialized skills, not just a willingness to show up and punch a clock.
We can’t helicopter back to 1980, no matter how much we might want to. Just like the piano bars on DC-10s, those days are gone.
The only way forward is not to chase economic nostalgia, but to prepare people for the future. That means investing in education, in workforce training, in new industries — not propping up old ones with trade barriers and wishful thinking.
The world has changed. We can either change with it — or be left behind, grounded on the tarmac, still waiting for a helicopter that will never come.
Mark Lewis, a Colorado native, had a long career in technology, including serving as the CEO of several tech companies. He’s now retired and writes thriller novels. Mark and his wife, Lisa, and their two Australian Shepherds — Kismet and Cowboy, reside in Edwards.
