There goes the New York Times and Eduardo Porter again–trying to sell us on the notion that there is no future in American manufacturing. This is the paragraph that just downright offends me:
“The nation is well on its way through a second transition, this time to a postindustrial economy with little factory work to be had. Even as industrial production has grown, the economy has shed seven million manufacturing jobs since 1980. Manufacturing’s share of employment has shrunk to 8.5 percent of nonfarm jobs from a peak of nearly 27 percent in 1920.”
What does a postindustrial economy mean? The truth is that existing manufacturing sectors in the United States such as autos, aerospace, construction, semiconductors and others are revolutionizing the way they make things. They are world-class competitive. Others are bringing jobs home from China, as reported by the Reshoring Initiative. The total number of manufacturing jobs created in the United States in 2015 exceeded the number that were shipped offshore, according to the Reshoring Initiative.
Then there are new technology sectors where there is a huge amount of effort to create new jobs–medical and biomedical, which Porter mentions, but also robotics, nanotechnology, flexible electronics, advanced materials, genomics etc. The list goes on. These are new industries and the jobs are not in old-fashioned factories. They are in labs and more modern production facilities. They require more advanced skills sets that traditional workers with only high school degrees.
The only thing that saves Porter this time is that he actually asks an important question, what could government do to help create jobs and he acknowledges that the poisonous political climate has prevented us from coming together on sensible middle-of-the-road solutions. I guess that’s progress.
