Yeah, I also took issue with the author's point that branding and marketing was so easily swappable. I'd say it's much easier for a global brand to swap where t

Yeah, I also took issue with the author's point that branding and marketing was so easily swappable. I'd say it's much easier for a global brand to swap where their factories are or who is running logistics than it is to just "create a new brand". Still, as another child comment of your post mentioned, branding doesn't employ the same number of people as manufacturing, so the US is shifting the share of job quantity to other countries. A lot of those middle-skill jobs get picked up by the still-growing service industry (which we can never outsource), but I'm pretty sure we're still exporting more lower/middle-class jobs than we're importing. Ultimately, tons of non-service jobs will get automated anyways, so in the long term I don't think it's enough to say, "Just keep the jobs here!" That just means robots do them instead of cheap foreign workers. I'm a big proponent of investing more in adult re-education to help retrain people for new jobs as their old ones disappear. But even then, who knows if that's enough. It's a very complicated issue.