REALCLEARMARKET EDITOR:To bemoan the loss of manufacturing jobs is to bemoan economic progress
This from a service manager? A writer whose job is in hock to market makers?
John Tammy is the name you want.
RIA if you wish
Hardly a day goes by without some pundit bemoaning the loss of the U.S. manufacturing base, and with it, jobs. Usually the blame is placed on China.
It’s nice, frequently heated rhetoric. But it’s also utter nonsense.
To bemoan the loss of manufacturing jobs is to bemoan economic progress. Not asked enough of those with rose-colored visions of a not so glamorous manufacturing past is what advanced economic society anywhere in the world has gotten that way by way of clinging to days gone by. In the U.S. we can point to Michigan as a state stuck in the past, and the result is massive unemployment in concert with the outflow of the state’s best and brightest citizens.
Did I just read that to want to have the LARGEST MANUFACTURING OPERATIONS IN HISTORY is pointless?
Indeed, as a recent USA Today editorial noted, “American companies are making lots of stuff”, and in fact they’re producing “about 80% more than in 1979 with nearly 8 million fewer workers.” Some would like to blame China here, but in truth they should be cheering the very innovations that attract job creating investment by virtue of companies doing more with less.
For one, the happy destruction of jobs was always thus, and it’s a signal of an advancing society. Considering agriculture, from 1900-1920 in the U.S. agriculture and mining accounted for 30-40% of total employment. Today that number is a fraction, but far from pushing Americans to the breadlines, economic evolution pushed them into better, higher valued work. Would anyone in their right mind really like to return to the days in which the U.S. economy was largely farm based? The same applies to manufacturing.
Considering manufacturing, if we date its decline as an employer to the 1970s, it should be said that the drop in actual workers has coincided with a rise in higher-paying work away from the factory floor. Specifically since the ‘70s, managerial and professional employment has been the fastest growing job category.
And they are managing WHAT NOW? Wait it gets MORE unbelievable
Yes, manufacturing jobs were destroyed as is always the case in a healthy economy, but those jobs were once again replaced with better ones. And rather than blame China, we should instead embrace advancement. Just as productivity enhancements reduced manufacturing employment, so did the computer reduce the need for clerks and secretaries. Not acknowledged is how much worse off we’d be if Americans were still stuck in the work of yesteryear.
But since they’re not, rather than blame China, we should thank investors. It was investors whose intrepid doings funded advancement that freed us from labor the markets no longer wanted
Thank the investors whose amoral insistence on lowest cost, manipulated the govt laws to reward flight to lowest labor costs?
plus it’s investors who are unwilling to pay the wages that used to prevail in manufacturing. Instead of blaming China here, we should blame Americans who wanted a standard of living higher than what investors in manufacturing were willing to pay
Had the law been for a LEVEL playing field, LEVEL solutions would have meant jobs would remain here. But if you allow investors to dictate that capitalism means Nike pays workers in Jakarta who live in soggy cardboard boxes in from the jungles (literally) who simply want to avoid starvation (WSJ, 1996) that’s what you get.
That, Mr. Tammy is what you got. And then, rather than actually CHEAPER products (what do sneakers cost now and what were Keds costing in 1970?) manufacturers are emboldened to skyrocket the price, profits to bonuses to chutzpah ridden top execs, and the boards which allowed it and finally dollars chasing more investment, which finally floats a real estate bubble in which ends in an unresponsibve govt with no credibility, an academic elite which cannot even recognize a conflict of interest and what is unethical and a business investment class which sldies between themselves, academia and govt that self enables a cycle which finally terminates in #occupy and a pre revolutionary Tea Party.
The simple and happy truth is that there are no jobs without investment, and as evidenced by factory worker pay in China, investors have no interest in paying anywhere near the wages Americans have grown accustomed to.
In The Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton warned his readers about falling for the “deceitful dream of a golden age.” Manufacturing is just that. Once the employer of many at high wages, those days are long past, so to dream of a manufacturing future for the United States is to pine for excruciating poverty.
Note that this author provides no solution or replacement.
Creating capital equipment is where the profit is people. You start with NOTHING, then an idea, then raw materials, then engineering, then manufacturing.
We cannot all invent some new process whose fruition is in Shenzen and become rich off the ‘investors’. But we can see to it that the processes which reward the most people are the result of unions in China, Maylasia, and Burkina Faso, or Brazil, and the Central African Republic insisting that the working conditions of their workers equal those assembling Toyotas in Tennessee, and in so doing, LEVEL those labor costs.
Otherwise, Mr. Tammy, one fine day SOON the USA will be the site of the lowest labor costs.
Probably after the revolution and national default
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