WSJ.com - The Truth About U.S. Manufacturing

WSJ.com - Opinion: The Truth About U.S. Manufacturing

 

Is American manufacturing dead? You might think so reading most of the nation's editorial pages or watching the endless laments in the news that "nothing is made in America anymore," and that our manufacturing jobs have vanished to China, Mexico and South Korea.

Yet the empirical evidence tells a different story—of a thriving and growing U.S. manufacturing sector, and a country that remains by far the world's largest manufacturer.

In every year since 2004, manufacturing output has exceeded $2 trillion (in constant 2005 dollars), twice the output produced in America's factories in the early 1970s.

The truth is that America still makes a lot of stuff, and we're making more of it than ever before. We're merely able to do it with a fraction of the workers needed in the past.

Critics view the production of more with less as a net negative—fewer auto plant jobs mean fewer paychecks, they reason. Yet technological improvement is one of the main ingredients of economic growth. It means increasing wages and a higher standard of living for workers and consumers. Displaced workers learn new skill sets, and a new generation of workers finds its skills are put to more productive use.