What’s odd is that, even as US factories laid off an historically unprecedented share of workers, the amount of stuff they made rose steadily-or at least, it appeared to. Though the sector recovered slightly since then, America’s manufacturing workforce is still more than 26% smaller than it was in 2000. Even during the Great Depression, factory jobs shrunk by only 31%, according to a Information Technology & Innovation Foundation report. The drop was unprecedented-worse than any decade in US manufacturing history. Nearly 6 million American factory workers lost their jobs. That’s why what happened next is so alarming.īetween 20, manufacturing employment plummeted by a third. Even during the 1980s and 1990s, as Korea and other smaller Asian nations joined the ranks of Germany and Japan to threaten the dominance of US factories, the absolute number of manufacturing workers stayed mostly flat. In the four decades between 19, US manufacturing employment was basically stable, averaging around 17.5 million jobs. Worse than the Great Depression: America’s manufacturing jobs implosion And that means America’s manufacturing sector is in far worse shape than the media, politicians, and even most academics realize. Foreign competition, not automation, was behind the stunning loss in factory jobs. Thanks to a painstaking analysis by a handful of economists, it’s become clear that the data that underpin the dominant narrative-or more precisely, the way most economists interpreted the data-were way off-base. His supporters had succumbed to a nativist tale with cartoon villains like “cheating China” and a shadowy cabal of Rust Belt-razing “globalists.”īut it turns out that Trump’s story of US manufacturing decline was much closer to being right than the story of technological progress being spun in Washington, New York, and Cambridge. So when Trump won the presidential election, the true-blue data believers dismissed his victory as the triumph of rhetoric over fact. This was more of a shift than a loss, explained Bradford DeLong, economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley. But increased productivity boosted living standards, and as manufacturing work vanished, new jobs in construction and other services took its place. Manufacturers’ embrace of automation was supposedly a good thing. Sure, some factory workers lost their jobs. It’s Automation,” Harvard economist Lawrence Katz laid out the general consensus: “Over the long haul, clearly automation’s been much more important-it’s not even close.” In a 2016 New York Times article titled “The Long-Term Jobs Killer is Not China. For a decade or so, this phenomenon had been put forth by Ivy League economists, former US secretaries of treasury, transportation, and labor, Congressional Research Services, vice president Joe Biden, president Barack Obama-and by Quartz too, for that matter. This was hardly a groundbreaking insight. So we’re producing more and more stuff, even as we use fewer and fewer people to do it.” “American factories are about twice as efficient today as they were three decades ago. But that’s actually wrong,” the Vox article explained. “Declining manufacturing employment over the past 30 years has given a lot of people the impression that America’s manufacturing sector is in decline. An article in Vox, published a month before the 2016 presidential election, spelled out the situation. Robots and fancy machines had supplanted workers, turning the US into a manufacturing dynamo at the cutting edge of innovation. Trade may have been a factor-but it clearly wasn’t the main culprit. Yes, the US had hemorrhaged manufacturing jobs, losing close to 5 million of them since 2000.
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