But it’s ok US workers, outsourcing manufacturing is a “good idea”, so good that the other major economies are doing the opposite.
So their money certainly said it.
No worker ever supported this, it was the intellectual and moneyed class that pushed for this and sold it as some obviously great thing that definitely wasn’t too good to be true.
The poor and lower class alone didn't make Walmart a retail titan.
It was the middle class who launched walmart into the top spot and fortunately for them, compared to their lower income peers, they did not have to make those life or death cost saving decisions but chose to like when they wanted a new flat screen TV or niche kitchen appliance
These purchases werent truly necessary and id even argue whatever perihperal like a tv and kitchen aplliance they had owned was in working condition, maybe not the top of the line cutting edge device. So this wasn't truly a needed product except for upgrading for the sake of upgrading that the middle class started splurging on the idea of a discount being presented.
During that time, as TVs improved year over year I knew several families who would trade theirs in for the yearly imorovement almost like an iPhone upgrade.
I don't think someone has to necessarily be wage earning to be considered middle class.
Middle Class is a fairly broad and ubiquitous term used in the USA to refer to a group of the population who doesn't necesarily live paycheck to paycheck or is on government assistance and whose definition probably varies person to person.
The US economy is the world leader and continues to pull ahead of everyone else.
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/04/13/the-lessons-fro...
Most screws these days are not screwed on by "bodies." They are screwed on by machine. Much of employment in manufacturing these days is in higher value work: operating CNC machines, maintaining robots and other machinery, engineering, and so on.
If manufacturing work is so low value and commodity, why do manufacturing jobs pay $20k more per person, on average, than service work?
Why does the manufacturing sector have annual average compensation of $70k, despite taking place in generally LCOL areas?
Do you look at a modern car and say: wow, what a low-value commodity good?
The Economist article you cite says nothing about manufacturing and does not support your point. In fact, when you look at the total output of manufacturing today versus 1947, it is about the same percentage of our GDP: even though manufacturing employment has dropped from 35% of Americans to less than 9% because of efficiency gains. The idea that manufacturing has disappeared from America is false and a myth.
I invite you to actually go tour a modern manufacturing facility with high speed robotic computer-controlled production lines. It may make you think differently about the physical comforts you depend on in your life.
Look at Germany as an example, they do a lot of manufacturing and they have an excellent quality of life. They also make things that are objectively much higher quality than what comes out of Asia.
We can have both, an educated knowledge worker base and a manufacturing workforce, they are not mutually exclusive.
Some manufacturing, yes. But most manufacturing is highly complex, starting with t he suppliers, supply lines, workers etc. And manufacturing often brings in itself innovation.
"of low value commodity bodies to screw things on"
Most manufacturing is not so easy. Stitch some shoes in Africa? Maybe but even this is hard to scale in this environment. Try to assemble a complex product there. Hell, you might not even have reliable power and have to start building your own power backups there.
Not talking about military dependencies. What if Taiwan returns to China and does not deliver Chips anymore? How much of the world market do they supply? 70%
That’s what this “made in China” initiative is tracking - moving up the value chain in China.
For example google extracts value from sellers. If those sellers themselves sell product made and developed in china. Then soon enough the Chinese system will move up the chain by use of competitive regulatory, skill, and supply chain advantages
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2012/01/11/everyth...
I'm in the area with the very Caterpillar plant mentioned there.
The tiny amount of manufacturing they have tried (and mostly failed) to bring back pales in comparison to what the US used to produce.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/tags/series?t=manufacturing%3Bqu...
It takes up less of the economy of maybe, and we might focus on upscale things that have less consumer visibility like industrial stuff, but manufacturing in the US seems to be in an OK spot.
Also the rest of the world’s pie grew, which is also fine.
The US made everything… for a while, after the rest of the world had blown up all of each other’s factories. Nobody is hoping for a repeat of that whole mess!
Further, from a purely economic sense, outsourcing makes the most sense. Most people will be able to by everything for much cheaper which more than compensates for the lost jobs in one area. We also have record high employment. So from a purely economic perspective, we are doing great!
To me the real issue is the strategic importance of certain manufacturing areas. China can build 200 military ships in the time we build one. 20 subs in the time we build slightly more than one. We need to get our military supply chain back in shape if we want to remain globally dominant and keep us and our partners safe!
Setting China as an outlier that does reshoring/industrial planning at the expense of the [American] worker is a politic fantasy. It forgets that reshoring is a global phenomenon also found in democracies [1] that is rather the result of a more uncertain world where logistics change with the success and wanning of political favors and alliances.
[1] https://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/en/french-foreign-policy/econ...