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Comment by not_a_moth | Hacker News Reader

Would love to see the 40 year update...

Shelling out our industrial/manufacturing economy for a "services economy" + big government/welfare economy has ended the middle class; meanwhile the political class (and media) have consolidated into a front group for an increasingly hidden ruling class/aristocracy, who like the companies behind shell companies are pretty hard to identify and lampoon.

This of course would be an intriguing book to read should someone dare to write it.

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An aside, but I constantly hear that The U.S.'s industrial/manufacturing sector has been gutted, but I also constantly hear that we're manufacturing more than ever before. What's going on? Is it an absolute number vs. a proportion of GDP issue? Or is it employment vs. production output (output being higher per employee now because of automation)?

More production per worker - due to automation and other efficiency improvements.

>due to automation and other efficiency improvements.

Which is due to OSHA, HR and other overhead increases.

Which is due to...(I dunno but probably some sort of economic surplus)

So the deal is basically that we're producing more goods than ever, even as % of GDP, but the proportion of our labor force that's involved in that production has cratered. Got it, thanks!

It was (at least when I looked at this circa 2012, it might have changed since then) largely an artifact of Boeing and Intel: both produced fantastically expensive physical items from factories that were highly sought at by the rest of the world and had amazing profit margins. But were just two companies (vulnerable to management mistakes) and both didn't employ that many people to actually make their stuff. E.g. in 1953 steel alone in the US employed 650,000 people, and now Intel and Boeing combined employ 250,000 people worldwide, the vast majority of whom are engineers/back office types, not actually working on the factory floor.

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