And there are innovative schools out there that are teaching young adults the skills necessary to operate new machinery and programs. In schools like Ranken Technical College in St. Louis, Mo., students are being trained on cutting-edge equipment for jobs in the construction and manufacturing industries.

The proof is in the data. These schools have a nearly 98% placement rate and often work with local businesses to employ graduates in hometown companies.

Although education leads to employment, consumers have to be willing to buy American.

Free-range chickens, local oranges and organic avocados in your grocery store. We are largely conscious consumers in that we increasingly research where our food is produced, yet too many Americans don’t take the time to research and demand their t-shirts, jeans and everyday living necessities are made domestically. And some of this burden falls on the manufacturers and storeowners who need to promote the “Made in America” brand.

The perfect example of a major company producing in America is the athletic shoe company New Balance that employs about 1,300 workers in New England alone. While critics make the claim that American-made products are more expensive, New Balance sneakers are competitively priced to foreign-made shoes like Nike.

But what role does Washington D.C. have in this movement? Better yet, what should they be doing to keep jobs in America?

Instead of burying the responsibility in the halls of the U.S. Department of Commerce, we agree with many scholars and thought leaders that there should be a separate agency focused on manufacturing.

A U.S. Department of Manufacturing could create national standards, guidelines and incentives for manufacturers.

As filmmakers, we get tax incentives for making our movies in certain states. Why not do the same for manufacturing companies? Tax incentives would keep U.S. companies from outsourcing and lure jobs back from overseas. In fact, this idea of bringing companies back to America would help bring almost five million jobs to our shores by 2020, reducing our stagnant unemployment rate by three percentage points.

And some — unfortunately, few — are fighting for U.S. jobs in the Halls of Congress.

Scott Paul, president of Alliance for American Manufacturing, a partnership made up of American manufacturers and the United Steelworkers union, has offered great ideas on how to improve our manufacturing policy overseas. He’s called for a refocus on “trade agenda by giving American businesses new tools to counter China’s currency manipulation, industrial subsidies, intellectual property theft and barriers to market access.”

Our country is eager to re-energize U.S. manufacturing and in some towns they are already taking the necessary steps. We are hopeful that success stories slowly coming out of our small and large cities will help motivate a united effort by consumers, educators, the business community and policy makers to bring jobs back to America.

Vincent Vittorio and Nathan McGill are directors of the upcoming documentary “American Made Movie,” premiering nationwide on Aug. 30 .

This space in an anonymous building in New York’s Long Island City neighbourhood, just across the river from Manhattan, isn’t cooking up breads and pastries, however. It’s a factory, filled with 3-D printers “baking” items by blasting a fine plastic dust with lasers.

When a production run is done, a cubic foot of white dust comes out of each machine. Packed inside the loose powder like dinosaur bones in sand are hundreds of unique products, from custom iPhone cases to action figures to egg cups.

Manufacturing is coming back to New York City, but not in a shape anyone’s seen before. The movement to take 3-D printing into the mainstream has found a home in one of the most expensive cities in the country. New York’s factories used to build battleships, stitch clothing and refine sugar, but those industries have largely departed. In recent years, manufacturing has been leaving the U.S. altogether. But 3-D printing is a different kind of industry, one that doesn’t require large machinery or smokestacks.

“Now technology has caught up, and we’re capable of doing manufacturing locally again,” says Peter Weijmarshausen, CEO of Shapeways, the company that runs the factory in Long Island City.

Weijmarshausen moved the company here from The Netherlands. Another company that makes 3-D printers, MakerBot, just opened a factory in Brooklyn. And in Brooklyn’s Navy Yard, where warships were once built to supply the Arsenal of Democracy, there’s a “New Lab,” which serves as a collaborative workspace for designers, engineers and 3-D printers.

3-D printers have been around for decades, used by industrial engineers to produce prototypes. In the last few years, the technology has broken out of its old niche to reach tinkerers and early technology adopters. It’s the consumerization of 3-D printing that’s found a hub in New York. The technology brings manufacturing closer to designers, which New York has in droves.

Shapeways’ production process is fairly simple.

Anyone can upload a 3-D design to Shapeways’ website and submit an order to have it “printed” in plastic at the factory. The company charges based on the amount of material a design uses and then ships the final product to the customer. Smartphone cases are popular, but many items are so unique they can only be identified by their designer, such as the replacement dispenser latch for a Panasonic bread maker. There’s an active group of designers who are “Bronies” – adult male fans of the show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic – who print their own ponies. The company prints in a wider range of materials, including sandstone and ceramic, at its original factory in Eindhoven, the Netherlands.

If that was all Shapeways did, the company would be little more than an outsourced machine shop. But with the help of the Internet, it’s taking the business model one step further. Anyone can set up a “shop” on the Shapeways site and let people order prints from their designs. Want a replica skeleton of a Death’s-head Hawkmoth? That’s $15. How about a full-colour sandstone sculpture of actor Keanu Reeves? He’s $45.

Under the old mass production model, Weijmarshausen says, designers first need to figure out if there’s a market for their product, then raise money for production, and then find a manufacturer, who usually has to custom-make dies for moulding plastic. The cost can run to tens of thousands of dollars. After that, the designer must get the product distributed and find out how customers react to it.

“With the Shapeways shop, that process is completely condensed,” Weijmarshausen says. “If there is no market for your product, then the only thing you lose is some time.”

For its part, MakerBot is spearheading another side of the 3-D printing boom by making affordable desktop 3-D printers. About the size of a microwave oven, the printers feed melted plastic out of “print heads” that move in three dimensions, gradually building objects as the plastic cools. Instead of sending a 3-D design to Shapeways, a MakerBot owner can print an object in plastic at home, as long as it’s smaller than a loaf of bread. MakerBot’s printers range in price from $2,200 to $2,800.

MakerBot’s factory is in an old industrial building on Brooklyn’s waterfront, across the street from a Costco and a strip club. Only assembly, testing and repair is done here, so the interior looks more like a workshop than a manufacturing plant. Subcontractors elsewhere do the dirty and noisy jobs like machining of components.

The privately held company agreed in June to sell itself to Stratasys Ltd., a maker of professional 3-D printers, for $403 million in stock. Stratasys is based in Minneapolis and Rehovot, Israel, but Bre Pettis, the CEO of MakerBot, says the factory will stay in Brooklyn.

Pettis looks like a Brooklyn hipster, with his thickrimmed glasses and upswept hairdo. The company got its start in the borough, and he says keeping the factory here is a rational economic decision. Having the engineers nearby means the company can work fast and introduce more than one new model a year, a crucial advantage in the fast-moving 3-D printing space. Pettis also notes that labour costs are going up in Asia’s manufacturing hubs. “Brooklyn Pride” is also a factor.

“You can’t underestimate the power of people who take pride in their work,” he says.

Weijmarshausen moved Shapeways to the U.S. to get closer to its customers. He picked New York over cities such as San Francisco and Boston because of its design and fashion industry, which meshes well with 3-D printing.

Alas for New York, the consumer 3-D printing industry is still a tiny one, and there’s no indication that it could single-handedly reverse the long, slow flight of manufacturing jobs. Of the one million manufacturing jobs the city had at its peak during the Second World War, 93 per cent are now gone, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The Shapeways factory has 22 employees and plans to ramp up to at least 50, while MakerBot employs 274 people. And the jobs aren’t necessarily well paid; Pettis says the MakerBot factory workers make “more than minimum wage.”

But Weijmarshausen points out that Shapeways has the potential to provide a livelihood for many more people – successful designers. There are already hundreds of them making “substantial” money from their online Shapeways stores, but he won’t reveal specific figures.

In a larger sense, 3-D printing opens up the possibility of a new type of manufacturing economy, one that aligns more closely with the strengths of American creative meccas like New York than with the strengths of China.

David Belt, a real estate developer whose company is refurbishing the New Lab space in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, says there’s a demand for products that are made in runs of less than 10,000 units. That’s too few to be economical using conventional injectio
n-m
oulding of plastic, but viable with 3-D printing.

One example of the combined power of 3-D printing and direct-to-consumer sales is the Spuni, a new type of spoon for babies. Boston couple Isabel and Trevor Hardy noticed that a baby taking a bite from a regular baby spoon leaves a lot of food on the utensil. Together with their friend Marcel Botha, an entrepreneur who makes medical devices, they sketched up a new spoon that “front-loads” the food, leaving less uneaten. Thanks to a 3-D printer, they had a prototype utensil eight days later, ready to test with a live baby.

“We were able to reproduce what the final spoon would look like physically at a very low cost,” Botha says.

With the prototype, Botha and his partners were able to demonstrate the Spuni to buyers through a video on crowdfunding website Indiegogo. Their campaign for donations raised $37,235 – enough to start a mass production run. The spoons are being made in a traditional factory in Germany, but Botha is running the Spuni project from the New Lab in Brooklyn.

On the factory floor in Brooklyn, Adjua Greaves, 32, does quality assurance work, testing MakerBot printers before they’re shipped. She used to work in publishing, a signature New York business that’s been hurt by the rise of ebooks. After freelancing for a while, Greaves wanted a steady job, and says she had “a romantic idea about working in a factory,” partly inspired by a Sesame Street episode about the making of crayons.

“I always wanted to have a connection to a factory, but more as an intellectual observer,” she says. “The romantic idea of a factory is very, very different from what it’s really like in a factory, but it’s really, really wonderful to be here.”

My hometown — Port Clinton, Ohio, population 6,050 — was in the 1950s a passable embodiment of the American dream, a place that offered decent opportunity for the children of bankers and factory workers alike.

But a half-century later, wealthy kids park BMW convertibles in the Port Clinton High School lot next to decrepit “junkers” in which homeless classmates live. The American dream has morphed into a split-screen American nightmare. And the story of this small town, and the divergent destinies of its children, turns out to be sadly representative of America.

Growing up, almost all my classmates lived with two parents in homes their parents owned and in neighborhoods where everyone knew everyone else’s first name. Some dads worked in the local auto-part factories or gypsum mines, while others, like my dad, were small businessmen. In that era of strong unions and full employment, few families experienced joblessness or serious economic insecurity. Very few P.C.H.S. students came from wealthy backgrounds, and those few made every effort to hide that fact.

Half a century later, my classmates, now mostly retired, have experienced astonishing upward mobility. Nearly three-quarters of them surpassed their parents in education and in that way advanced economically as well. One-third of my classmates came from homes with parents who had not completed high school and, of that group, nearly half went to college.

Low costs at public and private colleges across Ohio were supplemented by locally raised scholarships — from the Rotary Club, the United Automobile Workers, the Junior Women’s Club and the like. Although the only two black students in my class encountered racial prejudice in town and none of their parents had finished grade school, both reached graduate school. Neither for them nor for our white classmates was family background the barrier to upward mobility that it would become in the next century.

J’s rise from a well-knit but modest working-class family to a successful professional career was not atypical, as a recent survey of my classmates revealed. My classmates describe our youth in strikingly similar terms: “We were poor, but we didn’t know it.” In fact, however, in the breadth and depth of the social support we enjoyed, we were rich, but we didn’t know it.

As we graduated, none of us had any inkling that Port Clinton would change anytime soon. While almost half of us headed off to college, those who stayed in town had reason to expect a steady job (if they were male), marriage and a more comfortable life than their parents’.

But just beyond the horizon a national economic, social and cultural whirlwind was gathering force that would radically transform the life chances of the children and grandchildren of the graduates of the P.C.H.S. class of 1959. The change would be jaw dropping and heart wrenching, for Port Clinton turns out to be a poster child for changes that have engulfed America.

The manufacturing foundation of Port Clinton’s modest prosperity in the 1950s and 1960s began to tremble in the 1970s. The big Standard Products factory at the east end of town provided nearly 1,000 steady, good-paying blue-collar jobs in the 1950s, but the payroll was more than halved in the 1970s. After two more decades of layoffs and “give backs,” the plant gates on Maple Street finally closed in 1993, leaving a barbed-wire-encircled ruin now graced with Environmental Protection Agency warnings of toxicity. But that was merely the most visible symbol of the town’s economic implosion.

Manufacturing employment in Ottawa County plummeted from 55 percent of all jobs in 1965 to 25 percent in 1995 and kept falling. By 2012 the average worker in Ottawa County had not had a real raise for four decades and, in fact, is now paid roughly 16 percent less in inflation-adjusted dollars than his or her grandfather in the early 1970s. The local population fell as P.C.H.S. graduates who could escape increasingly did. Most of the downtown shops of my youth stand empty and derelict, driven out of business by gradually shrinking paychecks and the Walmart on the outskirts of town.

Unlike working-class kids in the class of 1959, many of their counterparts in Port Clinton today are, despite toil and talent, locked into troubled, even hopeless lives. R, an 18-year-old white woman, is almost the same age as my grandchildren. Her grandfather could have been one of my classmates. But when I went off to college on a scholarship from a local employer, he skipped college in favor of a well-paid, stable blue-collar job. Then the factories closed, and good, working-class jobs fled. So while my kids, and then my grandchildren, headed off to elite colleges and successful careers, his kids never found steady jobs, were seduced by drugs and crime, and burned through a string of impermanent relationships.

His granddaughter R tells a harrowing tale of loneliness, distrust and isolation. Her parents split up when she was in preschool and her mother left her
alone an
d hungry for days. Her dad hooked up with a woman who hit R, refused to feed her and confined R to her room with baby gates. She says her only friend was a yellow mouse who lived in her apartment. Caught trafficking drugs in high school, R spent several months in a juvenile detention center and failed out of high school, finally eking out a diploma online. Her experiences left her with a deep-seated mistrust of anyone and everyone, embodied by the scars on her arms where a boyfriend injured her in the middle of the night. R wistfully recalls her stillborn baby, born when she was 14. Since breaking up with the baby’s dad, who left her for someone else, and with a second fiancé, who cheated on her after his release from prison, R is currently dating an older man with two infants born to different mothers — and, despite big dreams, she is not sure how much she should hope for.

R’S story is heartbreaking. But the story of Port Clinton over the last half-century — like the history of America over these decades — is not simply about the collapse of the working class but also about the birth of a new upper class. In the last two decades, just as the traditional economy of Port Clinton was collapsing, wealthy professionals from major cities in the Midwest have flocked to Port Clinton, building elaborate mansions in gated communities along Lake Erie and filling lagoons with their yachts. By 2011, the child poverty rate along the shore in upscale Catawba was only 1 percent, a fraction of the 51 percent rate only a few hundred yards inland. As the once thriving middle class disappeared, adjacent real estate listings in the Port Clinton News Herald advertised near-million-dollar mansions and dilapidated double-wides.

The crumbling of the American dream is a purple problem, obscured by solely red or solely blue lenses. Its economic and cultural roots are entangled, a mixture of government, private sector, community and personal failings. But the deepest root is our radically shriveled sense of “we.” Everyone in my parents’ generation thought of J as one of “our kids,” but surprisingly few adults in Port Clinton today are even aware of R’s existence, and even fewer would likely think of her as “our kid.” Until we treat the millions of R’s across America as our own kids, we will pay a major economic price, and talk of the American dream will increasingly seem cynical historical fiction.

Do you agree with the writer?  Can you relate with the story?  Please comment below.

A version of this article appeared in print on 08/04/2013, on page SR9 of the National edition with the headline: Crumbling American Dreams.