American manufacturing is not dead.

For those people who think America can’t manufacture anything any more: the stats say otherwise*. An excerpt:

What has dropped is the number of employees–manufacturing has become increasingly efficient and labor numbers are at levels last seen in the 50’s.

(* - Shamelessly stolen from the Make Magazine blog.)

Of course. I’m not sure anyone really disputed this. However, a lot of the people complaining come from heavily union areas and/or old manufacturing towns, who either could not or would not adapt to the increasingly fast and energetic global competition and service-based economy.

Edit to add: The odd thing is that “manufacturing” was itself dominant for a relatively short period of time, and only during the post-WW2 era was it really very good for the workers themselves. Thus, many of them don’t like the new changes and want to go back to the high-wage, high-stability world of the 1950’s. That’s not going to happen.

I think the issue is the rate of change is happening faster than people and communities can adapt to it. A century ago, your family might have been in the same business for generations. Now people work in industries that didn’t exist a decade ago. This is scary for some people, especially if they have been working the same job for 40 years.

Manufacturing may not be dead, but I don’t know that I would necessarily choose it as a career path.

Or perhaps we’ve built social structures that make it harder to adapt to change.

A social safety net has a downside. Minimum wage laws and prevailing wage laws and the Davis Bacon act have downsides. These things tend to make wages more sticky and therefore restrain the economy’s ability to adapt. In an economic downturn, a normal correction pattern would be that wages would fall, and therefore wage productivity would rise, which would encourage new employment. If you set up barriers to wage reduction, you cut off the mechanism that allows the economy to regroup and adapt to changing circumstances.

Another huge drag on job liquidity is the American health insurance non-system. How many people are working at jobs that are suboptimal, because they can’t pursue the career they want without losing essential health care? It’s usually OK to switch from one company to another. But if you want to start your own business or be self-employed, you’re pretty much screwed, insurance-wise.

From the article

I don’t get the point of this article. As it says, people mean that US companies aren’t hiring Americans to make things, so pointing out that US companies are still making things despite not hiring people to do so proves…what? The complaints are about lack of employment opportunities that used to exist, not a desire for things to be made here for other reasons.

Definitely technology has replaced many jobs in manufacturing, but you can’t ignore the fact that during WW2 we had bombed and nuked two of our competitors.

Also countries like Japan tend to buy domestic products. I am not sure what their tariffs or if they even have any… and if they do I’m not sure how it effects prices on imports. There are some exceptions, I don’t know of any American products other than some media like music or video which is popular over there. Even US video games/consoles don’t sell well over there.

That could be one reason for Japan’s success when compared to the US.


Things Government should do

  1. Socialize the Banking system. It lends out too much money and reduces the value of our currency and it gambles with our money on the stock market.
  2. Get rid of NAFTA and start collecting tariffs. The exporters of the world still want to sell to Americans, but the higher prices will encourage Americans to buy american goods… if there is a trend that Americans stop buying typically cheap products from other countries they might make the brakes in our cars work, or stop contaminating goods with lead.
  3. Socialize healthcare so people are more healthy and able to work. Lowers the cost of healthcare for people and allows them to do their basic consuming.

Things America could do to improve industry:
Start buying domestic.
Stop buying from transnational companies where the profits get spread out across many sectors around the world.
Stop buying things you don’t need.
Stop borrowing money from banks.
Start eating better and stay in shape.

What manufacturers can do:
Get rid of the planned obsolescent mentality and instead make goods which won’t break or go obsolete in a year.
Stop flooding the market, and release fewer products. Do we really need a new model of car every year?
Create more modular designs that allow more upgrading vs completely replacing a good.
Change your system. Stop working for greed or your stock holders and start working to improve the lives of your community. You don’t need to give away your money, but you could pay your employees a decent wage. That is what improves communities.

The workplace doesn’t have to be a unionized because those have problems too. Pointless strikes out of greed… instead give the employee some stake in the company and use a worker-owned cooperative model which gives the employee a portion of company profits based on performance, and not some wage. Is this similar to commission? Yes, but commission is mostly used in the sales field which I have problems with sales in general.

You know, I’m trying to name 10 goods that are made in America off the top of my head, but I’m drawing a blank. Looking around my house didn’t help.

Looking around your house only tells you something about cheap consumer manufacturers and the end branding of said manufacture (never mind it is highly unlikely you know the real origin of any of the items).

Off the top of my head I encounter American industrial goods relative to industrial turbines, machine tools, airplanes, and heavy industrial machinery and mining machinery.

Of course one could simply read the article to see anecdote driven innumeracy is not a great method to analyse a subject.

This amusing hard left laundry list just has fuck all to do with the question (insofar as it does not address the article’s data driven observation that amount of mfg is maintained, simply with more efficiency / less direct labour inputs):

Amusing recitation of economically unfounded, primitive mercantilist actions, mixed in with some pretty irrelevant Leftist moralising that has fuck all to do with mfg jobs (indeed a number of items would without doubt reduce mfg employment by cutting America off from its export markets and also reducing actual levels of production due to reduced economic activity (based on imposing what is in the end merely a Leftist canard about excessive commercialism, nothing new, but merely reflective of some people’s personal tastes - I for one reject such nonsense).

The point is that American manufacturers has gotten more efficient, producing more with less. That is good for your overall growth.

Popular and Leftist complaints in this area are in essence fetishising an ephemeral moment in your history, the 1950s-1960s when due to WWII the US had a unique dominance in industrial mfgs, without real solid competition either from Europeans or others. That moment had to pass and it did. The outsized gains you had, which flowed down to employment levels and wages in industry might only be sustained if you imposed a mercantile empire over the whole world.

Complaining about the passing of that moment, unless you plan on imposing Empire a la Napoleon,

Otherwise, the complaint about efficiency reducing labour usage is your typical populist economic illiteracy, no different than 19th century complaints about good farm labour jobs, or the like evaporating with change.

Except domestic products are often expensive and highly specialized/custom/high end. Audio gear, musical instruments, motorcycles, appliances, etc. It’s tough to find “cheap crap” that most people can afford that’s made in the USA anymore.

You’re one to talk about fetishising. You handwave away the experiences of millions of working class Americans and all the evidence of increasing income inequality and trade deficits in favor of a fucking graph because it supports the warped free market mentality we have that assumes the ultimate and inevitable direction of our economy is towards a small percentage of elites driving production towards the path of least labor resistance, reaping all the benefits, and leaving the rest of us to serve them coffee and do their nails. Or whatever the hell the plan is. Nevermind the problems that exist in trying to tabulate these numbers (such as taking a good that is mainly manufactured overseas, assembling it in America, and counting the total value of the good as domestically produced). We’re supposed to trust economists to come up with accurate representations of the economy and not make ridiculous assumptions?

I am indeed, at least I understood the bloody graphs.

It is not ‘handwaving’ away - it is merely observing reality and historical experience, never mind that industry is not the only form of labour employment in the world. Just because there is a “good old days” nostalgia for a fleeting moment does not make industrial employment an eternal good for the economy, regardless of whether one is ‘working class’ or otherwise.

Income inequality is not the same issue as industrial employment.

Neither is trade deficits, which are very much an artefact of American deficit spending and lack of private savings as such.

The graph is actual data and reality.

Your lashing out is emotive and not tied to any analysis as such.

The rest of your incoherent ranting is not of much interest.

I’ll just note that the rate of growth appears to be more-or-less linear. Manufacturing should at least grow with population, which grows at a compound rate. I suspect that it should be above even that, if it was growing with demand. A straight line is, in fact, a decrease.

This is all fine, but says fuck all about adapting to change.

First, ‘normal correction pattern’ may be better read as ‘idealised correction pattern’ as without laws, it is clear that wages are sticky, and that leaving aside the Austrian school idealisation of economic actors, real observational economic data strongly indicates that employees strongly resist direct wage cuts (although indirect less so). The stickiness is clearly something driven by human behavioural biases, which law only really codifies.

Second, it seems clear that given the consistent and fundamental human bias towards loss aversion, that the US system is about as “efficient” in this sense as one can get in a non-dictatorship.

I understand the graphs just fine. That doesn’t mean there aren’t problems with the underlying data.

And income inequality is most certainly related to employment. If we’re increasing productivity but shedding jobs, to whom are the benefits accruing? If you want to say “all of use because of a lower cost of goods,” is that “benefit” worth it, and can we all continue to enjoy that benefit if we stop leveraging ourselves to the hilt and engaging in this consumption orgy?

What about the glass in your windows? The paint on your walls? The carpet on your floor? The nails and screws holding it all together?

I live in a concrete bunker.

That is not evident from any given comment you have made so far.

Then address actual data in a substantive manner, rather than making empty and vague insinuations about said data.

Sometimes it is, sometimes it is not. But it is most certainly not a fundamental driver relative to industrial production.

It is also rather clear that address distribution issues is not best done by trying to hard code into the economy a certain type of production.

You, not we. you’re talking USA, eh? A bit of referential discipline.

First, shedding ‘industrial jobs’

The economy and the nation, to start. Second, one should expect other sectors, such as technology and other emerging areas of production or services.

Rather evident, I should think.

The long-term gains of efficiency, versus short-term populism, have been demonstrated again and again.

First, you continue to mistake consumer good production for industrial production. They are not synonyms.

Second, your issues relative to over-indebtedness are another issue, although of course related to your issues of lack of savings (either governmental or private) , which tends to drive the trade deficit.

(logically speaking, lower cost of goods via greater efficiency should help reduce the cost pressure to be indebted as such)

In general the Left’s complaint’s here are mostly emotive howling rather than a logical examination of separate issues, and aren’t responding at all to the actual data.

Oh, you’re not American? Then who cares what you think.

I’ve been posting on this very topic for a couple months, so I’d like to address a couple points that I have addressed in the past.

A quick calculation suggests that output is not linear. The first graph in the OP’s cite is industrial production (not manufacturing output), but comparing the output from the bottom of the current recession to the peak at the beginning of 1970 we can easily see that industrial output has more then doubled. However, population has only increased by ~50%. Then industrial production per capita has increased by about 40% in that time (more, now that we’re in recovery). A post of mine from September (below) shows that manufacturing output per capita rose by a third or so within the same time frame.

Another old post of mine, this time from January, is below. It shows that 10 of the 11 durable goods categories reached their all-time peak output in the last decade. Five of those reached their peak just prior to the current recession.