You’re plant has just closed and you’ve lost you’re job.

For some time you receive unemployment benefits and possibly special re-training benefits. But that occurs right where you live. Where you’ve possibly lived for generations. It takes a lot of determination/courage to pack up and move.

In the meantime your plant has closed and slowly support businesses close. Retail businesses close and the downtown starts to look like the abandoned streets of a dystopian movie.

But the big drag is your home. It’s your largest asset and possibly you’re only one. With all the lost jobs, home values decline. You’re asset become a liability.
Your house is repossessed. You can’t afford to move. You’re on welfare, and chained to a life that offers no hope of a better future.

I think that had something to do with the malaise in the midwestern rust belt.

Pretty simple. Agricultural jobs were lost as farms became bigger and more mechanized. But that’s not what happened after China gained permanent MFN status and a place in the WTO.

Companies moved their manufacturing to China for cheap labor and lower regulatory costs. From 2000 to 2010, manufacturing employment dropped significantly from 17.3 million to about 11.5 million—a loss of 5.8 million jobs. This is a much steeper decline than the prior decade, averaging roughly 580,000 jobs lost per year, compared to roughly 40,000 jobs lost per year the previous decade.

“The point of the manufacturing industry, or the service industry, is not to multiply “jobs”. It is to produce abundance. Abundance of stuff, and abundance of services. Because abundance makes us richer. “Jobs” do not make us richer.”– Niketas C.

No, the point of reshoring industries is to create a bigger tax base. We need to do that quickly as the trend of increasing government debt doesn’t work in our favor. That’s one of many goals,

I don’t think philosophical considerations like abundance or wealth pay the bills– you need a paycheck for that (which requires a job). Abundance in a downturn is a millstone around a manufacturer’s neck. I worked in a manufacturing environment which used lean techniques. The average delivery of a machine from an order was about a year.

A newly hired executive from the sales side decided we could take more market share if we upped production on one line. Lots of overtime and we soon had a plant full of these machines– just before the Great Recession hit. It took several years to sell down the excess inventory at tremendous expense.

I know that’s not what you meant by abundance, but we are in an age of efficiency and excess anything is a drain on the balance sheet.

We need all kinds of jobs– service oriented for the thinkers and hands-on oriented for the doers. It seems from the conversations that some don’t think increasing manufacturing jobs would have a benefit to the economy or worth the effort.

A system works well because it interconnects many participants, or subsystems, but it is fragile because that interconnectedness may have many points of disruption and potential for failure. Ideally the system design includes the ability to cut out a given subsystem and continue with the rest of the systemic operations at 80+ % capability. Of course the internet was intended to be robust against selected line to node failures by rerouting connections around failed areas. But it is dealing with a single or simple transport/transfer content of information packets, fitting within a limited and structured hierarchy of communication functions [and many here know more about the details of that than I do].

But our transactional networks deal with a wide variety of objects and services with substantial interdependency between/ among them, aka Smith’s “hidden hand”. Add in the necessity and wisdom of protecting against supply chain failures impacting national security, including medical and pandemic responses, etc., and the global trade among unequal and mercantilist nations becomes less attractive. In particular if the working population did not, or felt they could not, move to getter job locations, gain new education or skills, etc., to match the presumed new opportunities such foreign trade made possible and perhaps even required, and we end up with our current populist discontent. A lot of that discontent originates because the national and business “leadership” did not in fact provide leadership, or even mere guidance and encouragement. [And leftist political power plays just added to that leadership gap and arrogance, etc.]

But what I do not seem to be seeing or hearing from anyone is just how we are going to make our current interconnectedness and interdependency less so, up to a point of valid protection*, but retain as much of the benefits of both global and national specialization and trade otherwise. I am encouraged by comments from Vance, Thiel, and others about innovation and productivity, etc., but then the MSM ignores what that really means in terms of what people have to learn to give up and to work to obtain in new skills, outlooks, etc. As our hostess has emphasized, change is hard. Too few are saying such change has always been necessary and has always been hard, but often easier in hindsight than foresight.

Any thoughts in that direction are welcome.

*Another scary topic I listened to last night was the mention of both solar and enemy nuclear weapon created EMP attacks that would decimate our electronically controlled world and all of the dependencies for food, medicine, transport, etc. that involves. I don’t know exactly how we protect against that situation, but it seems buying and storing a few thousand transformers in suitably protected locations, and other lesser level protections for controlling and providing grid power, plus vehicular and other electronics would be a good cost/trade off, even just for a naturally occurring EMP potential, let alone a warfare situation.

And equally silly to make a blanket assertion that manufacturing jobs are better, or would be better if it weren’t for foreigners underselling us. I’m not saying you have, but certainly there are people commenting here who seem to believe such an assertion.

Probably this. For people who don’t click links:

Accommodation and Food Services
Arts, Entertainment, and Recreation
Health Care and Social Assistance
Educational Services
Administrative and Waste Services
Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services
Real Estate and Rental and Leasing
Finance and Insurance
Information
Transportation and Warehousing
Utilities

I clicked through to your blog: everything you say about the service sector applies just as well to manufacturing. A lot of people in the service sector are janitors, and so would be a lot of people in manufacturing. As you say there, many of the actual roles are almost identical. An accountant or a CFO of a manufacturing firm is not going to have a very different job from one in an insurance company despite the classification of the sector.

Here’s the thing that you and I, I suspect, agree on, though maybe you won’t say it the way I do. The point of the manufacturing industry, or the service industry, is not to multiply “jobs”. It is to produce abundance. Abundance of stuff, and abundance of services. Because abundance makes us richer. “Jobs” do not make us richer.

I do not understand why so many people are fetishizing the manufacturing sector and its “lost jobs”, and not (for example) agriculture and its “lost jobs”. Or the “lost jobs” of the cobblers, for that matter. I think people have a lot of mistaken impressions about what the past was really like. Before WWII the peak share of manufacturing jobs was about 31%. Very shortly after WWII the peak share of manufacturing employment was only about 33% and it has declined ever since. This is not a new phenomenon.

No one born after WWII has experienced a sustained period of expanding share of manufacturing jobs, as a glance at the data makes perfectly obvious. There is no obvious change in the slope of that curve until 2010: and then it gets BETTER, because the decline is SLOWER. Nobody making a case for protective tariffs has, to my knowledge, admitted these two long and sustained trends of decline for just about 80 years now. Children born at the peak share of manufacturing employment have grown old and died while this decline was going on.

As to your point about poor education putting people in dead-end service jobs, I fail to see why poor education wouldn’t also put people in dead-end manufacturing jobs. I’m sure you would not try to claim there are fewer dead-end jobs in manufacturing then in services…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkOFlJhZUmc

(I have a small investment position in this company)

https://commoncts.blogspot.com/2025/04/fair-and-balanced-wins-again-top-12.html

https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/73750.html