The Bicycle Man

Dave Eggers' new book focuses on American outsourcing:

In years past, Alan was married to Ruby, an abrasive if good-looking activist who wants, in her loud, unpleasant way, to save the world. (Her ideal mate, Alan later decides, would have been Aristotle Onassis or George Soros.) Back then he worked as an executive at Schwinn, the long-classic bicycle manufacturer. But Alan was part of the team that decided it would be cheaper to build bikes in China instead of the United States. Unfortunately, once the Chinese learned how to produce a solid product, they undercut the American price point and put Schwinn out of business.
Since then, Alan has lurched from one misjudged business venture to another, gotten divorced, and is now facing utter ruin:
“He had moved from Schwinn to Huffy to Frontier Manufacturing Partners to Alan Clay Consulting to sitting at home watching DVDs of the Red Sox winning the Series in ’04 and ’07. The game when they hit four consecutive home runs against the Yankees. April 22, 2007. He’d watched those four and a half minutes a hundred times and each viewing brought him something like joy. A sense of rightness, of order. It was a victory that could never be taken away.”
Alan yearns for such a victory himself, recalling with bitter nostalgia a time when he was “selling actual objects to actual people.” Alas, the America of foundries and factories, of mills and looms, seems to have vanished. Even when trying to establish his own premium, Made-in-America bicycle company, Alan finds himself dismissed as a relict of the past. “Some of the bank people were so young they’d never seen a business proposal suggesting manufacturing things in the state of Massachusetts. They thought they’d unearthed some ancient shaman, full of clues to a forgotten world.”

That concept is made very real by the fact that my friend's dad ran Schwinn back in that time frame, and that I saw Huffy close its plant in Celina, Ohio when it moved all of its production to China.  The short term gains of outsourcing just don't make sense long term.