Since we are so efficient, I wonder why our products are also the most expensive in the world. The reason Americans buy so much imported stuff is the price! And if manufacturing can be so efficient, why not the Pentagon and all other govt. agencies? When Musk whined about "waste, fraud, and abuse" he never mentioned the military, but I would bet my pension that they waste and misappropriate at least 40% of all the money we lavish on them!
John, I checked the core numbers here against independent sources, and they hold up cleanly: the 16-17% share of global manufacturing output second to China, the $141,000 value-added per worker figure roughly 45% ahead of South Korea and multiples ahead of China, the record export totals. None of that is invented. It's real, verifiable data.
But it's also a carefully chosen slice of the real data. What the piece leaves out is the other equally true story sitting right next to it: manufacturing's share of US GDP has been falling for decades, from around 16% in the late 1990s to roughly 10% now, and America's overall share of global manufacturing output has been sliding steadily against China for twenty straight years, with some projections putting it under 12% by 2030. "We're doing it better and smarter" and "we're a shrinking slice of a rapidly growing pie, losing ground to China every single year" are both accurate descriptions of the exact same underlying numbers. The piece tells you the first story and simply never mentions the second.
It's also worth noting that in one sense the phrase "we didn't lose manufacturing" is technically right, because the country decided, deliberately, to let other nations do it instead. And the price of that decision keeps compounding. America has already lost the lead in electronics to Japan, in steel and shipbuilding and now batteries to China, and cars, the industry that once defined American manufacturing more than any other, are heading the same way. The beat goes on. "We're more productive per worker" is true and worth saying. It's also the kind of true thing a country says right before it notices the lead in one industry after another has quietly changed hands.
That's a subtler problem than getting the facts wrong, and arguably a more common one. Selective framing built entirely on real statistics is much harder to catch than an outright fabrication, because every individual number checks out under scrutiny. The manufacturing renaissance Austin describes is genuinely real at the level of productivity and value added. Whether it adds up to "America never lost anything" depends entirely on which half of the ledger, and which industries already gone, you're willing to read out loud.
The more important question than how much wealth is created is "for whom?" and "where?" I'd be interested to know what the average wage of someone working in manufacturing is, relative to some sort of cost-of-living measure in the area they need to live to work that job and adjusted for inflation. I'd just be guessing, but I'd be surprised if we're better off than we were in the '70s.
That's the problem with economic stats: people at the extremes can distort the overall number, when what people really care about is how an average person in the system would fare.
We can bitch and moan and come up with all kinds of grand schemes that will never get through a corporate owned Congress but it's never going to get better until a living wage prevails and the people can afford the products we make instead of settling on the lowest price option.
Since we are so efficient, I wonder why our products are also the most expensive in the world. The reason Americans buy so much imported stuff is the price! And if manufacturing can be so efficient, why not the Pentagon and all other govt. agencies? When Musk whined about "waste, fraud, and abuse" he never mentioned the military, but I would bet my pension that they waste and misappropriate at least 40% of all the money we lavish on them!
John, I checked the core numbers here against independent sources, and they hold up cleanly: the 16-17% share of global manufacturing output second to China, the $141,000 value-added per worker figure roughly 45% ahead of South Korea and multiples ahead of China, the record export totals. None of that is invented. It's real, verifiable data.
But it's also a carefully chosen slice of the real data. What the piece leaves out is the other equally true story sitting right next to it: manufacturing's share of US GDP has been falling for decades, from around 16% in the late 1990s to roughly 10% now, and America's overall share of global manufacturing output has been sliding steadily against China for twenty straight years, with some projections putting it under 12% by 2030. "We're doing it better and smarter" and "we're a shrinking slice of a rapidly growing pie, losing ground to China every single year" are both accurate descriptions of the exact same underlying numbers. The piece tells you the first story and simply never mentions the second.
It's also worth noting that in one sense the phrase "we didn't lose manufacturing" is technically right, because the country decided, deliberately, to let other nations do it instead. And the price of that decision keeps compounding. America has already lost the lead in electronics to Japan, in steel and shipbuilding and now batteries to China, and cars, the industry that once defined American manufacturing more than any other, are heading the same way. The beat goes on. "We're more productive per worker" is true and worth saying. It's also the kind of true thing a country says right before it notices the lead in one industry after another has quietly changed hands.
That's a subtler problem than getting the facts wrong, and arguably a more common one. Selective framing built entirely on real statistics is much harder to catch than an outright fabrication, because every individual number checks out under scrutiny. The manufacturing renaissance Austin describes is genuinely real at the level of productivity and value added. Whether it adds up to "America never lost anything" depends entirely on which half of the ledger, and which industries already gone, you're willing to read out loud.
Thanks for all the details and the analysis of the methodological issues here. I'm hardly an expert on economics, but what you say here makes sense.
I'm no expert, either, Marta, but it seemed obvious to me that America has lost a whole bunch of manufacturing.
The more important question than how much wealth is created is "for whom?" and "where?" I'd be interested to know what the average wage of someone working in manufacturing is, relative to some sort of cost-of-living measure in the area they need to live to work that job and adjusted for inflation. I'd just be guessing, but I'd be surprised if we're better off than we were in the '70s.
That's the problem with economic stats: people at the extremes can distort the overall number, when what people really care about is how an average person in the system would fare.
We can bitch and moan and come up with all kinds of grand schemes that will never get through a corporate owned Congress but it's never going to get better until a living wage prevails and the people can afford the products we make instead of settling on the lowest price option.