Manufacturing Jobs Are Never Coming Back
For more than 60 years, my family owned a small paint factory in Long Island City, Queens, in the shadow of the neon Pepsi-Cola sign just across the East River from Manhattan. That factory and the Pepsi-Cola bottling plant are long gone — two of the hundreds of industrial facilities that once existed throughout the city.
What has replaced some of them are gleaming towers of condominiums, many with seven-figure price tags. Trendy restaurants have supplanted blue-collar diners. In a few decades, New York's industrial base was extinguished, yet today, the city has never been more populous or more prosperous, a winner in the process that the economist Joseph Schumpeter called 'creative destruction.'
President Trump — who is persisting with his incoherent effort to increase American manufacturing — shows little sign of grasping this key concept. Just as New York prospered as a postindustrial economy, so can the United States flourish without attempting a wholesale rebuilding of lost industrial prowess.
I understand that the relaxation of trade barriers, particularly since China was admitted to the World Trade Organization in 2001, helped accelerate the disappearance of manufacturing jobs. In retrospect, we should have been less lackadaisical about the loss of an estimated one million manufacturing jobs to China in the 2000s. At a minimum, we should have done more to help displaced workers adjust.
But that doesn't mean we should try to bring those jobs back. In the heyday of American manufacturing, such workers enjoyed far higher wages than those in services. No longer. That advantage has been shriveling for decades and, by some measures, has disappeared entirely.
And manufacturing work is often unpleasant. Assembling iPhones is the definition of tedium — long hours performing repetitive tasks, like inserting the same small component over and over, for pay well below our minimum wage. Little wonder many Americans — particularly younger ones — view classic factory work as unappealing. Today, there are nearly 500,000 unfilled manufacturing jobs.
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