American manufacturing is not dead.

[Dr.Love]

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.

@Sage_Rat

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.

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.

@Dr.Love

Industrial Production and Capacity Utilization in the US, compiled by the Federal Reserve. Look, especially, at Chart 1, which shows the manufacturing output out the United States over the past 40 years. If you look at the chart*, even after accounting for the damage done by the current recession, we’re still manufacturing roughly twice as much as was manufactured in 1970. The population in 1970 was about 200 million, which means the US is now manufacturing roughly 33% more per US citizen than it did it 1970.

The graphs are constructed from source data measuring physical output of each industry, then combined in a weighted average. The weights are “derived from their proportion in the total value-added output of all industries” (from the explanatory notes). Notice that neither the physical output, nor the weights are affected by inflation, and thus the graph itself automatically corrects for inflation.

What is true is that manufacturing employment is dropping. Part of this is probabily because other countries are increasing their manufacturing employment, but it is also because the manufacturing workers that remain are becoming increasingly more productive. Basically, we don’t need as many manufacturing workers because the ones we have are so damn good at what they do.

*The Federal Reserve should update the report to include data from July in about five days, so what I say will be a bit out of date soon…

@MOIDALIZE

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.

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.

@Dr.Love

After searching around a bit, I can’t find anything that details how (or if) the definition of manufacturing has changed over the years. However, the FR has all of its data available for download. You can see it at here. So I looked at the data available on durable goods, from 1976 to present, which you should be able to download from this link. In particular, with this data I found the year of peak output for each type of durable good:

Wood Product, 2005
Nonmetallic Mineral Product, 2006
Primary Metal, 1978
Fabricated Metal Product, 2008
Machinery, 2000
Computer and Electronic Product, 2008
Electrical Equipment, appliance and component, 2000
Motor vehicles and parts, 2004
Aerospace and Misc. Transport, 2007
Furnature and related product, 2006
Misc., 2007

With the exception of Primary Metal, all categories reached their peak in the last decade. Primary metal reached 84% of its highest output in 2006. Electrical equipment and Machinery also had more recent peaks: Electrical equipment reached 87% of its peak in 2008, while Machinery reached 99% of its earlier peak in 2007.