3c hapter - Index of

30 Locavesting
A Return to Value
As the fast- money mores of Wall Street have pervaded our culture,
manufacturing has lost its appeal among young entrepreneurs.
Sagar Sheth, the young cofounder of Moebius Technologies, has
spent a lot of time thinking about this. “Manufacturing requires
a lot of work, a lot of up- front investment, a lot of the things that
younger people don’t care about anymore. And I think that’s the
scariest thing about where the U.S. is right now. There’s very little
value placed on making things,” says Sheth, whose company
employs eight full- time employees in a hard- hit neighborhood
in Lansing, Michigan. While Moebius hasn’t yet turned a profi t,
orders have been fl owing in.
Sheth, a thoughtful 33- year- old, has bigger concerns. “Culturally,
we have lost a sense of respect for what brought us here,
what got us to this place as a country—building things that the
world can use,” he continues. “We’ve created this image that
there are ways to make easy money—you know, where you can
sit in a college dorm room and write a social networking site and
become a billionaire. Or you have these smart kids coming out of
school and going to Wall Street and making a lot of money playing
around with numbers. These are the pipe dreams that so
many young people are aiming towards. They’re no longer going
out and trying to start companies that can make hundreds of
thousands of dollars a year. They’re now looking for ventures that
can make millions upon billions of dollars a year, and that require
very little upfront cost. We could buy stuff from China—we know
that. We could sell it back in the U.S., make our 30 percent margins
and build a big company around it. The reality is, it’s not
what we believe in.”
Globalization is here to stay. But isn’t it time for a backup
plan? We’ve seen what unfettered free markets and fi nancialization
have wrought. The question now is, how do we begin to create
a more diversifi ed and resilient economy that supports the
betterment of society? How do we once again channel capital to
the innovative entrepreneurs that make things of value and create
jobs? How do we keep at least some Kansas money in Kansas? In
this, we all have a role to play.