Because the USA has more money than other countries. People outside the US can't afford to buy our products, but we can afford to buy theirs. This is ideal for many people in the US who want cheap $200 flat screen TVs in every room of their house.
This isn't good for unskilled labor in rural parts of America, often in swing states. Manufacturing had always been a place for high school grads to have a decent career. Those days are over with, but politically they decide the election.
Automation was reducing the number of manufacturing jobs. But "free trade" has taken away a lot of the manufacturing itself. The US as a whole can no longer make the TVs and iPhones that it consumes so many of.
There's more manufacturing than there ever has been in the United States.
It doesn't make low value-added goods like TVs, it doesn't employ a lot of people, and it's not growing as fast as other sectors, but we still manufacture more than ever before.
The “crumbling” sensation is because fewer people are employed by it and more people are employed (and earning more) in other sectors.
I was with you until the assumption that more people are earning more in other sectors. 1) they are often not the same populations of people and 2) many people are also making much less in the low-wage service economy when they would have had middle class wages in manufacturing in previous generations.
The answer to this is unions and social reforms, not more manufacturing. Manufacturing sans social reforms produce absolutely horrific conditions. Good conditions can be created by any highly productive industry (of which manufacturing isn't on a relative basis anymore) paired with social reforms.
Agree. Unfortunately, there seems to be a change in the social norms of business. Eg, pay structures that would be laughed out of the board room in previous generations are considered just the way we do business now. Same with the erosion of unions, etc.
> It doesn't make low value-added goods like TVs, it doesn't employ a lot of people, and it's not growing as fast as other sectors, but we still manufacture more than ever before.
Yes, aerospace and military tech are the biggest manufacturing industries in USA... Quite profitable these days with all these conflicts...
Unemployment is low in the US though? what type of jobs do high school grads do? and would working in a (let say) doll factory be a better job for them?
A lot of people work dead end jobs at walmart or trucking (which is another industry that has taken a big shit like manufacturing)
Manufacturing and trucking jobs and the like paid 20-40% above what you could make at Walmart and other big corporations.
I grew up in a rural town and people decry losing jobs to places like walmart. That said, I still think the bread and butter of american business are all the small businesses that are still kind of trucking.
Small construction companies, small engine repair, home repair, mechanics, etc.
As a high school grad with nothing but a diploma I got jobs working retail, doing data entry/discovery for a law firm, working the graveyard shift as a receptionist for a 24-hour facility. Are those better than doing factory work? I don't know. The discovery one was pretty cushy, but still rather monotonous.
They move to where the jobs are but the ones left behind without a big-city job have disproportionately large political power and disproportionately little education. Letting land vote was a generationally catastrophic mistake, the US has a political system suited for an agrarian/early-industrial/frontier society rather than an urban industrialized society that also happens to be hegemon of the world.
Perfect answer but it's also important WHY the USA, "has more money than other countries."
It is because we are the only country that prints money at will and forces the rest of the world to use it at gunpoint.
The entire basis of our way of life is essentially printing worthless pieces of paper and digital assets and then literally giving the rest of the world the ultimatum we will kill you if you don't buy and use our currency.
True. It's weird how many of the people who used to know this and protest against it forgot it when the US started using that same power to force their culture onto other countries along with the currency.
As an American, I want my country to get out of this obviously unsustainable position of debt-based hegemon. The tricky part is doing so while staying strong enough that the rest of the world doesn't (quite reasonably) decide to come take a piece out of us to get back at us for the decades of bullying.
This isn't good for unskilled labor in rural parts of America, often in swing states. Manufacturing had always been a place for high school grads to have a decent career. Those days are over with, but politically they decide the election.