Invisible value-added? Yes here it comes, Father, as you knew it would -- the IP [read, intellectual property, please. BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA] express:

"A growing percent of every consumer dollar goes to people who analyze, manipulate, innovate and create.

These people are responsible for research and development, design and engineering. Or for high-level sales, marketing and advertising. They're composers, writers and producers. They're lawyers, journalists, doctors and management consultants. I call this "symbolic analytic" work because most of it has to do with analyzing, manipulating and communicating through numbers, shapes, words, ideas."

Breathtakingly pompous, eh? Note the follow-up patronization:

"Symbolic-analytic work can't be directly touched or held in your hands, as goods that come out of factories can be...."

My God, he must have Jerry Springer's audience in mind.

"Whatever consumers buy these days, they're paying more for these sorts of tasks than for the physical material or its assemblage. On the back of every iPod is the notice "Designed by Apple in California, Assembled in China...."

And here's the punchline, you illiterate sponge folk:

"You can bet iPod's design garners a bigger share of the iPod's purchase price than its assembly...."

Now comes Walleye Junction. With one eyeball we gotta take in the future, 'cause

"America's biggest challenge is to educate more of our people sufficiently to excel at such tasks.... In decades to come, nations with the highest percentages of their working populations able to do symbolic-analytic tasks will have the highest standard of living and be the most competitive internationally."

Oh, yeah, there is more, following the source material, " The Future of Manufacturing, GM, and American Workers (Part I)".