US manufacturing output is at an all-time high today. It hasn't decreased, it has significantly expanded since NAFTA was created. Productivity destroyed those jobs. The US is producing far more output, with far fewer manufacturing jobs. It's a replication of the productivity gains in farming previously. Workers have to move to other skill fields with growth, just as they did as farming's productivity soared.
> But even these anemic numbers mask serious mismeasurement of manufacturing output. More than 110 percent of all real manufacturing growth during this period was driven by a single sector, computers and electrical components (NAICS 334), whose output has been shown by numerous academic studies to be seriously overstated as a result of the very rapid rate of progress in computer processing speeds. Because this one sector (NAICS 334) accounted for all the output growth from 2000 to 2009, the other 18 major manufacturing industries were as a group producing less at the end of 2009 than they were in 2000.
It's particularly obvious that "computers and electrical components" do not account for the manufacturing output index climbing from 100 to 130+ between 2009 and 2016 and hitting a new historical high.
> It hasn't decreased, it has significantly expanded since NAFTA was created
"computers and electrical components" account for a good deal of the expansion in this time period.
Output is growing but it's lagging behind GDP growth. A heavy amount of the growth after the recession comes from the automobile sector. It's uncertain how sustainable that is.
It's just more complicated than trumpeting that manufacturing is at an all-time high. There are real concerns underneath those numbers.
It is a situation nothing at all like farming. Manufacturing output in current dollar terms is focusing on a few remaining successful sectors: autos, metals, some machinery and a half dozen, much smaller ones. Most of that growth is more about Japan's problems than our advantages.
Farming went the other way, it industrialized, and our wealth and government policy revolutionized it with Midwest grain and California's miracle in the desert.
Do you have some numbers to back this up? I don't recall almost everything in my house being manufactured in China when I was a child in the 70s. It appears to be the case now though.
I'd say the things around the house that say Made In China on them are largely things that simply didn't exist in the 70s. I'd like to find some kind of comparison to look into whether that intuition is correct, but whether it is or not, the numbers absolutely show US manufacturing is high and growing. It's manufacturing jobs that are disappearing, mostly due to automation.
What's being made in Asia that didn't exist before is super low cost disposable stuff that a lower-income family could buy, or that a middle-income family could throw in a guest room. I suspect that pattern exists all over -- I have some high-end first-world manufactured goods in my kitchen, but I also have some crappy junk that I use infrequently or on an almost disposable basis. Turn the clock back 40 years, and I would just have the high-end goods, without the pizza cutter or avocado masher or whatever.
This makes sense; furniture is big, heavy, and difficult to transport. Outsourcing is easiest with small, pricey items that can be safely packaged in rectangular boxes. Like phones.
Furniture, cars, houses etc. are cheapest when produced semi-locally, which is why even Japanese and Korean car manufacturers have assembly plants in the US and in Europe.
Responding because I'm getting downvotes... I (an American) was hired at one company because the management felt the country where the company was started (not in the USA) had sub-par engineering talent. Now I don't believe that statement to be true, in this specific case or in general, but wouldn't that make me a thief? Should I be locked in jail for taking a job people thought they owned?
US manufacturing output is at an all-time high today. It hasn't decreased, it has significantly expanded since NAFTA was created. Productivity destroyed those jobs. The US is producing far more output, with far fewer manufacturing jobs. It's a replication of the productivity gains in farming previously. Workers have to move to other skill fields with growth, just as they did as farming's productivity soared.