It occurs to me as I think about this topic more and more (sadly article is paywalled so I can't speak to it directly), manufacturing is to blane for lost manuf

It occurs to me as I think about this topic more and more (sadly article is paywalled so I can't speak to it directly), manufacturing is to blane for lost manufacturing jobs. Economies are self balancing, and since manufacturing makes goods cheaper, eventually people will do other things that are still expensive. This is prediminantly why people talk about transformation to service economies. Manufacturing is inherently about mass producing, which means it's always been about scale, which means doing more without adding proportionately to labor. Automation is just one of the many things that help scale, it's just one of the many things that requires capital investment. The bigger problem for manufacturing jobs has been globalization. When you can take your capital to a market with cheaper workers, then labor becomes a scaling tool (ironically?) in that you can throw labor at a problem to get your labor costs down. What's interesting about this, though, is that at some point you can't do this anymore. Textiles, which is considered level 0 for manufacturing, has nowhere left to go for cheaper labor than Bangladesh (without significant political instability issues).