Engineers as Visionaries

This article emphasises on the need of intellectual leadership role for engineers in reindustrializing America. If America has lost its technological and industrial compass, it is strongly arguable that engineering is better equipped than most other professions to correct it by helping the nation build a new vision of its technological future. The reindustrialization of America on a massive scale is now needed more urgently than ever, and engineers have a pivotal role to play in it: not only in its implementation, but also in motivating the American public and its policymakers to pursue reindustrialization and technological innovation as a national goal. The article concludes that engineers must move into a central place in the nation’s intellectual life, rather than occupying a technical advisory role on the side. If they achieve this, a new golden age of industrial productivity may yet await America in the 21st century, with engineers in the forefront of the visionaries who lead it.