Thus it is with industries. I have witnessed the, er, evolution of several in my family. One grandfather worked at a Massachusetts- based shoe company -- back when making shoes and related stuff (especially shoe-making machinery) was a huge business in New England. Such now down-at-the-heels burgs as Brockton, Mass., were thriving with prosperous, well-paying shoe manufacturers. These firms, generally very locally owned, hired many of the immigrants pouring into America in the late 19th and early 20 centuries. With highly skilled cobblers a populous group in Mittel Europa, many of the Brockton shoe workers came from the large but fragile Austro- Hungarian Empire.

People good at science and math, such as my grandfather, went to work for such companies, as they might have at a high-tech company 70 years later.

With the coming of the Depression, the industry started to contract dramatically. After the prosperity during World War II and the immediate post-war years, the sector shrank faster, as shoe companies moved south (aided by new factory air-conditioning) and overseas, drawn by cheap wages and burgeoning international trade. It wasn't as if making shoes disappeared. It just moved.

My late father, who worked for a long while for a shoe-making- machinery company, described the decline as it accelerated with a sort of jovial fatalism. It may seem incredible now, but that company, United Shoe Machinery Corp., was once one of the biggest companies in the world.

Still, the money made in New England from shoes and another big player, textiles, didn't disappear. It went into new industries, many of them in high-technology, generally paying better than did jobs in shoes and textiles. So New England remains one of the richest places in America.

It's important to decipher whether an industry will disappear or whether it will just change. I had a great-great-grandfather who had a factory that made gloves for people to wear while they held the reins of horses drawing carriages. That business, such as it was, died with the turn of the last century, for obvious reasons, as did that of other ancestors making whale boats. (Both done in in part by the rise of petroleum!)

The Brockton shoe company cited above, George E. Keith Co. (shoe trade name "Walk-Over") made very good footwear and refused to compromise -- good leather, high number of stitches and all that; and assiduously tried to avoid layoffs. But I wonder if the citizenry would have been better off in the long run if the New England species of this industry had died, or left, more abruptly, without the delusions that it could revive.

Then there was New England's minicomputer industry, superseded by personal computers, which expired far more rapidly than did the region's shoe business.

My other grandfather was a Minnesota lawyer who represented, among other enterprises, iron-ore companies in the heyday of Big Steel. In his time in the trade, about 1910 to 1950, the steel industry -- into which my father-in-law also went -- was a colossus, which became more so as such steel-using industries as the Detroit- based auto companies became behemoths.

The steel industry has adapted better than the car industry. I would have guessed a few decades ago it would have been the other way around. The steel companies are now much smaller than they used to be, and focused on specialty stuff, but they are doing okay. The Big Three car companies, however, have not reformed themselves enough. Too bureaucratic and hidebound. So maybe they will die.

Then there's the newspaper business, which I have seen in flush times (with profit margins way above the average for U.S. industries) and now the opposite.

The neurology of reading on paper isn't the same as reading on a screen. The former is far easier on the eyes, and casting your eyes over newspaper pages is apt to bring a certain kind of reader more serendipitous and useful discoveries than scrolling or bouncing around Web sites.

Still, buying paper and shipping it around are expensive, the Internet is instantly inter-active and you can look up stuff on it very quickly. Get it wrong but get it fast!

At least "information" has the sort of endurance, and vagueness, that the carriage-driving-glove industry lacked. The trick is to decide whether an industry will die or just change its locations and materials, say from tree pulp to silicon chips.

-- Robert Whitcomb

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