I’ve been doing a slow burn about the New York Times coverage of the issues facing the American economy. They have run two spectacularly stupid pieces, very prominently, in the past week. Here is the first.
With a headline, “The Mirage of a Return to Manufacturing Greatness,” reporter Eduardo Porter puts forth the proposition that the era of manufacturing is over in the United States and that it is pointless for presidential candidates to even talk about the possibility of reviving manufacturing. He quotes luminaries from Columbia and Harvard as saying it is time to move on to services and health care and finance. We can’t compete so let’s just give up.
It’s mind-boggling that New York Times reporters and professors at Columbia and Harvard know so little about what is really happening in the American economy and around the world. Every other arguably successful economy in the world (China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Germany, etc.) are built on the proposition that a country needs to stake out a position in high technologies, manufacture things based on those technologies, and export those goods. Creating a strong tech-based manufacturing sector is rightfully seen as a way of creating wealth but also as a means of guaranteeing national sovereignty and security.
The story also completely ignores the fact that some American jobs are coming home as costs explode in places such as China. The Reshoring Initiative, the most reliable source of information on these trends, reckons that more manufacturing jobs are being created in the United States than are being lost.
All across the country, states and regions are trying to rapidly improve the manufacturing base they already have. Companies are engaged in a complete remaking of the face of American manufacturing, adopting the latest best technologies. The United States has strong world-class manufacturing in the automotive, aerospace, semiconductor, medical equipment, biotech, and construction sectors. States and regions also are trying to give birth to new hot spots, or clusters, based on manufacturing. The Times seems to be completely unaware of what is really happening on the ground.
Porter’s analysis is so obviously and patently wrong that it is hardly worth debating. But the Times is such an important newspaper that someone who reads this might actually believe it. That would be tragic.
