Also due perhaps to real wages in the US declining to the point where cost/benefit calculations of US based production facilities are finally starting to add up for some manufacturers.
As automation gets cheaper I expect more and more manufacturing that really did move to not just come back to the US, but also new manufacturing to set up shop. Shipping costs are expensive and it only makes sense to be as close to your customers as possible. The one exception to this trend will be manufacturing that is inherently 'dirty.' Those will continue to be overseas until countries like China decide that destroying their environment for a short term gain isn't a very good long term strategy.
So, as in these articles, sometimes manual labor is cheaper than automation, but we may have reached a point where wages have 'normalized' enough throughout the developing world that the variance is not significant enough to make manual labor economical.
What are the billions of people in developing nations (south Asia, Africa) going to do for a living, if their infrastructure and economies have not matured enough to sustain their own 'homegrown' industries?
I mean, outsourcing was seen as detrimental to our economy, but this phenomenon also had an impact in pulling millions of people in dev nations out from arduous agrarian and other subsistence activities.
As 'unhealthy' as the city job might be, the alternative in the countryside is, for many people, worse. It's a life of a kind of feudalism.
Uh, figures?
It is one thing to say the US remained a manufacturer but to say the US didn't offshore a significant portion of its manufacturing capacity would seem to be an extraordinary claim which requires evidence, right?
The proportion of consumer goods I see which are marked "made in China" today approaches something like a hundred percent. Sure, there are other significant USA industries that produce a lot (and naturally have increased their output via automation) but it seems badly-spoken to say claim manufacturing leaving the US is myth. Some industries have left, "in mass", even.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/602691-u-s-manufacturing-lea...
From 2011:
http://www.newsday.com/news/nation/u-s-still-leads-world-in-...
Yet America remains by far the No. 1 manufacturing country. It out-produces No. 2 China by more than 40 percent. U.S. manufacturers cranked out nearly $1.7 trillion in goods in 2009, according to the United Nations. The story of American factories essentially boils down to this: They've managed to make more goods with fewer workers.
The point is that many US manufacturing industries have left.
The two points are different, especially for the workers who previously worked in those industries.
IE, the OP points that industries haven't left the US in mass. That the remaining industries are very productive is a different, etc.
Pointing to manufacturing jobs going away is an invalid metric to start. Manufacturing jobs are gone and going, but it's not something that can be stopped. Some jobs were moved overseas, but many have simply been automated away. Over time even the ones overseas will be automated away.
The difference is that China makes tons of duplicate copies of cheap goods, while America makes high value, lower run, complicated goods.
Which is why if you look only at consumer good you get the mistaken assumption that manufacturing is leaving the US. Try sourcing $100,000 machines and all of them are made in the US.
-Not exact figures.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/602691-u-s-manufacturing-lea...
Per capita. But not even close on an absolute basis - the US makes more than twice as much as Germany.
http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2009104319/g20-manufactu...
I couldn't find more recent numbers.
The "myth" claimed by the OP was that manufacturers have left the US. That is not a myth despite the US remaining a top manufacturing country - because, as you say, what remained specialized, high-value items (planes, chemicals).
A large number of particular manufacturers left the US.
As to your "make in China" - you'd have to buy many, many t-shirts or DVD players to even approach the magnitude of money going around in making, for example, Caterpillar construction equipment or BMW X5's.
That is wrong no matter how you measure US manufacturing output.
I'm sure when cars were invented there were closed down stables all over the place. Progress happened. Rural textile plants have left in favor of luxury car makes like BMW opening plants. Don't confuse a particular industry changing to manufacturing as a whole. The value of products produces simply doesn't show manufacturing leaving. In fact, the high dollar products are moving to the US.
It's made manufacturers seriously consider Africa as a low-wage manufacturer, but unlike some of the Asian countries, they do not have the political stability to enforce contracts.