Another thing to consider, when pondering counterfactuals to free trade: offshoring destinations are also automating. China is now the largest market for indust

Another thing to consider, when pondering counterfactuals to free trade: offshoring destinations are also automating. China is now the largest market for industrial robots: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/26/china-is-the-largest-market-for-robots-in-the-world-right-now-abb-ceo.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/26/china-is-the-largest-market-... Maybe when the local factory shut down in years past it transferred 500 jobs straight to China. That doesn't necessarily mean that it kept employing 500 people for the same output in the years since. Re-shoring the same volume of production may mean significantly fewer jobs today, in e.g. textiles: "U.S. Textile Plants Return, With Floors Largely Empty of People", 2013 https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/20/business/us-textile-factories-return.html https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/20/business/us-textile-facto... ... Take Parkdale: The mill here produces 2.5 million pounds of yarn a week with about 140 workers. In 1980, that production level would have required more than 2,000 people. ... Or in the case of fields that still are very little automated, like garment sewing, it would require pretty much the same number of workers now as 20 years ago. As you say, it's very product-specific. If we broaden the category a bit from "manufacturing jobs" to "industrial jobs" (including things like coal miners and workers at coal fired power plants), you also see strong effects from process-and-input changes. It takes far fewer people to produce a terawatt hour of electricity from a modern combined-cycle natural gas generating plant than from a modern (worse, built-in-1970) coal plant. It also takes fewer workers for a TWh from solar PV or wind power. The rapid growth of jobs in renewable energy is a temporary excursion, mostly an artifact of current rapid expansion. At steady-state it will take fewer people to supply electricity from a renewable-heavy electricity system than a coal-heavy system. That's one reason that I am bullish on the long term price-competitiveness of renewable electricity but skeptical that "green jobs" are a panacea for declining industrial employment in other sectors.