"Any society has a limit to how many manufacturing jobs can be lost before that society’s well-being is significantly impacted"—Ben Thorp, Harry Seamans, and Masood Akhtar, Biorenewable Deployment Consortium.

This week’s edition of TAPPI’s Ahead of the Curve (AOTC) examines the dramatic decline in U.S. manufacturing jobs since 1998. In their report titled" Invention, Innovation, and U.S. Jobs," Thorp, Seamans, and Akhtar emphasize that "this loss of manufacturing jobs has reached the point of creating national concern." Their AOTC article previews a full-length article set to appear in the March/April 2017 issue of TAPPI’s Paper 360° magazine. It focuses specifically on the question being asked by so many citizens today--"what happened to the good manufacturing jobs and the communities they once supported?"

Read this article in this week’s Ahead of the Curve.