> And outside relatively gender-neutral white-collar occupations, the economy as a whole has been shifting away from male-coded jobs toward female-coded jobs. The chart below shows the shares of employment in health care and social assistance (blue line) and manufacturing (dashed green line) since 1990:
Think about it: regardless of the gender dynamics, that's a bad evolution. A shift from making things to not making them, as part of general enervation of the country. In that respect, health care and social assistance are as good as hawking crypto-coins and social media influencing.
> While Trump is telling Americans that he can bring back traditional manly jobs, Charlie Kirk called for a return to traditional gender roles — getting women to marry and have children young rather than focus on career.
And it's pretty clear that "getting women" to "focus on career" will eventually lead to extinction. It's a shortsighted optimization with severe medium to long term problems, a lot like industrial pollution. Of course someone like Krugman will try to hand-wave that problem away with immigration, but the math there just doesn't work. As best, that's like moving the factory overseas to destroy some poorer person's environment instead of yours. Birthrates are declining everywhere, including in poor countries. Worldwide fertility is at replacement and dropping. The poor places will get depopulated (e.g. poor elderly left without caretakers), and eventually fail to provide the needed replacement workers.
> Like Trump’s job promises, Kirk’s prescriptions were impossible. We will never return the share of manufacturing in the economy to 1950s levels, and neither will women eschew birth control and quit their careers.
Is Krugman that dumb? Nothing like that impossible. Imagining history as a ratchet moving monotonically to more progressivism is a delusion (see: Trump and the failure of minorities to cooperate with the predictions in "The Emerging Democratic Majority"). I mean, trivially, given enough time anything possible will inevitably happen. 1950s American society happened, so is possible, so something like it can happen again.
> Think about it: regardless of the gender dynamics, that's a bad evolution. A shift from making things to not making them, as part of general enervation of the country. In that respect, health care and social assistance are as good as hawking crypto-coins and social media influencing.
The opposed view is that decadence is a good thing: not making things is a natural consequence of being so wealthy and powerful that you don't need to make things. That things just get made, whether by machines or by less wealthy nations, and you just pay for them.
The problem is that it might never be possible to get there. Getting things that improve quality of life just fuels the demand for more. Even in the US there is neither an economy that can support UBI nor a population that would endorse it.
> And it's pretty clear that "getting women" to "focus on career" will eventually lead to extinction.
I feel fairly confident that the long-term (within the next century or two, say) trajectory for human population is much more likely one of approaching an asymptote, rather than one of overshooting what is sustainable and then seeing billions of deaths. The consensus estimates I have seen are in the ballpark of 11 billion. "Short-sightedness" in this regard is inherently self-correcting, at global scale at least.
> The opposed view is that decadence is a good thing: not making things is a natural consequence of being so wealthy and powerful that you don't need to make things. That things just get made, whether by machines or by less wealthy nations, and you just pay for them.
Except that's a fantasy. Eventually those "less wealthy nations" will realize the little green pieces of paper have no real value, that they actually control the real wealth, and then they should demand payment in something that's actually valuable, which the "wealthy" nation can no longer provide.
> I feel fairly confident that the long-term (within the next century or two, say) trajectory for human population is much more likely one of approaching an asymptote, rather than one of overshooting what is sustainable and then seeing billions of deaths.
It sounds like you're describing some kind of sudden Malthusian collapse due to mass starvation or something, which is not what I was talking about. I'm talking about a much slower process, where sub-replacement reproduction fails to replace, and you eventually get manpower shortages and too few people to care for the elderly without starving other parts of the economy.
> A shift from making things to not making them, as part of general enervation of the country.
This is not the shift that is happening. US manufacturing is currently very close to the record levels from before COVID right now (similar to the 2008 levels): https://www.macrotrends.net/2583/industrial-production-histo...
The manufacturing jobs have been going away because of automation, not because the actual manufacturing is gone.
That's not really better, though—it's a shift from a population who knows how to make things, to a population who doesn't know how to make things, because it's all been automated.
It may not be better, but the space of responses to such a situation is totally different. Incentivizing manufacturing won't bring back manufacturing jobs, because the new jobs are at least as easy to replace with machines as the old ones. Banning the machines will just make your manufacturing uncompetitive internationally. Making labor cheap enough to compete with machines necessarily lowers living standards for laborers, which will get you overthrown.
If you want people to learn how to make things even when it's economically non-viable to do so, you need to explore a totally different solution space outside of private industry. E.g. encouraging maker hobbies, or subsidizing trade schools. Industry will always move toward automation as long as it is cheaper.
> the space of responses to such a situation is totally different
I agree with all this.
> This is not the shift that is happening. US manufacturing is currently very close to the record levels from before COVID right now (similar to the 2008 levels).
But that's missing an important part of the picture: US manufacturing market share is decreasing, and it lacks the capability to build many extremely important classes of goods at scale. You're playing up the US stayed at 1x, while China went from 10x to 100x.
> The manufacturing jobs have been going away because of automation, not because the actual manufacturing is gone.
Meanwhile, the trade deficit is through the roof. What would the jobs picture look like if employment was kept constant and output increased significantly?
This is also relevant: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-23/how-biden... (https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1308-odd-lots-30972803/episod... for transcript):
> And then when firms come and try to do foreign direct investment, they come and say, well, you don't have the skills that we need, even though we can point to all the R&D investments, and I think the problem was we were sort of making these R&D investments in a vacuum and kind of hoping that they'd get sucked into an industrial ecosystem that, you know, despite what a lot of economists say about America still having a very high value add for manufacturing, you look on the ground and there are tons of anecdotes that the manufacturing ecosystem has atrophied and we have to make investments in order to bring it back up to be globally competitive. And I think an anecdote exactly like the delay in bringing EUV manufacturing to scale in the US, exemplifies why the old approach wasn't working. And we can debate like what the right ways are and how industrial policy should be structured, and what tax credits, etc. Need to be done, and trade reforms need to be done, but I don't think you can debate whether or not the old you know, let's call it pre-2020 approach was actually maintaining America's industrial competitiveness, because it wasn't.
This is an important space to think about, it just doesn't seem to have much to do with your claim of a shift from making things to not making them, as part of the general evolution of the country. That shift has not been happening. We are still making as many things; they are just not always the same things and fewer people are involved in that making. Even the growth only had 2 major interruptions on the chart: the 2008 financial crisis and COVID. The former was caused by financialization leading to too much supply of certain kinds of housing, not too little manufacturing. The latter was a black swan event, which was exacerbated by general lack of preparation for that sort of thing more or less everywhere outside of China.
If your claim is that the west should look for ways to address Chinese manufacturing dominance, I actually agree entirely! That is something that will most likely require steps relatively soon. However, in my assessment, attempting to bring back masculine-coded manufacturing jobs (through any means I have seen seriously proposed) is likely to have the opposite of that effect. The biggest competitive advantage the US has in this area is the capital to build out the very sort of automation that is replacing these jobs -- and this kind of action would be giving up that advantage.
> And it's pretty clear that "getting women" to "focus on career" will eventually lead to extinction.
As a parent of three, with two very career-minded women, I can tell you that it won't. We planned, did the work, and it all happened according to those plans. We could have had more, but we decided we had contributed enough to future generations. And the long-term effects continue to ripple on, as we already have grandchildren.