> 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.