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Most Americans are uncomfortable with a post industrial society in which jobs are either menial service jobs or filled by academics, creatives or IT people. Everybody remembers good paying industrial jobs that disappeared in the "big sucking sound" that presidential candidate Ross Perrot heard in the wake of NAFTA.
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Vestiges of the glory days of industrial production: Carroll Camden
Industrial Park, Baltimore (photo: ArchPlan) |
Now it is the Transpacific Partnership TPP that many fear will suck even more manufacturing jobs out of America. We have a sweet spot for manufacturing in our hearts which which grow fonder of it the more it dwindles. In that sense manufacturing is the new farming, an occupation once associated with hardship and exploitation, now part of a yearned for ideal. The dream of clean, well-paying local manufacturing and sustainable local farming bask in a warm glow.
The reality, of course, is that manufacturing in the US hardly was romantic in the past nor is it growing in the present. Expressed as part of the gross domestic product (GDP) it is now a measly 12% in the US. That compares to a more substantial but still small 22% in Germany and a heftier 32% in China (
World Bank). As a consolation prize, of course, there is always Greece with just 8%.
Once upon a time, 1950 to be precise, private sector goods, indeed, represented a much larger share, about 50% of the GDP, with services being pretty much the other half. (Services now amount to nearly 70% of the private sector part of the GDP). Before getting too depressed, though, one should consider that since WWII the GDP has continually grown which means that in chained dollars, 12% of today's 13.2 trillion dollar domestic product is still more than the 50% of the 2.27 trillion dollar product of 1950.
Whether you call the business history of the past 15 years the age of hedge funds, the age of Google (or its rival Facebook, or its other rival Amazon, or its other rival Apple), the age of Walmart, or even the cautionary age of Lehman Brothers and Countrywide, in no case would you call it the age of American manufacturing. Manufacturing's share of the total American economy has fallen by about the same amount as its workforce share: it went from about 20 percent in the early 1980s to just over 10 percent now. (James Fallows in the Atlantic, 2012)
Any success in bringing some part of production of goods back to our shores on account of quality, oversight, transport cost and logistics (on-demand and just-in-time supply), would not necessarily mean more jobs, just more goods and yet greater productivity. But that may vary widely from region to region as...
Archplan Inc. Philipsen Architects
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