7 ms·

US Manufacturing Isn't Dead, But its Jobs Are

39 points by doki_pen 16y ago

pluies_public 16y ago
Shouldn't the title read "its" instead of "it's"? Sorry if it seems like nitpicking, but as a non-native English speaker I find it weird how often this issue comes up. If any native speaker here has any idea why this particular mistake is so prevalent, I'd be very interested.
- mberning 16y ago
  You are correct, in the case of "it's" the apostrophe doesn't indicate possession, but rather a contraction of 'it is'. I think it is a confusing edge case, which English has many of.
  - NickPollard 16y ago
    Yes, it's one of English's many confusing edge cases, as normally an apostrophe does indicate posession - you would say "David's book", or "Sarah's pc" - so this catches many people out (including me, quite often).
  - bpyne 16y ago
    I wouldn't qualify it as an edge case. It was more of a change in philosophy about teaching kids to spell, which is something like "kids should spell it the way it sounds". The change started in the US at least 15 years ago. When I went through elementary school > 30 years ago, not using an apostrophe for a contraction caused a reduction in grade. Also, contractions were disallowed in formal writing. For instance, using a contraction in a paper was a reduction in grade. Changing times and philosophies.
- forgottenpaswrd 16y ago
  Shouldn't the title read: "But jobs are" without uppercase and the "it's".
  - podperson 16y ago
    No, "But its jobs are" would match the intent. Saying "But jobs are" would be a more general statement.
- oscardelben 16y ago
  I'm a non-native English speaker as well. More than this specific example I hate when someone uses then instead of than, because it often makes the sentence hard to understand.
- raganwald 16y ago
  As long as we're getting one nit, let's get two of them: it should be "its" with a lower-case "i" instead of "It's." "Isn't" should also be in lower case, "isn't." Even when composing a title with capitals, not all words should be capitalized. Setting "isn't" and "its" in lower-case makes the title easier to read and draws the eyes to the capitalized words that convey more meaning.
  - doki_pen 16y ago
    Sorry, I really should know better. I've fixed it.
    - raganwald 16y ago
      I wouldn't sweat it, I strongly suspect that little elegant guidelines like this are slowly falling into disuse. English is a "living language," which means that it sometimes grabs a beer, goes out back, has a smoke, and vomits in the gutter.
- saturdaysaint 16y ago
  It's a pretty easy typo to make. I was an English major in college and am still fairly conscientious about these things, but our entire culture of quick text-messages, status updates, and all the of-the-moment acronyms that those entail is fairly antithetical to any kind of grammarian proof reading. Educated people often intentionally dispense with the apostrophe simply to save time, safely assuming the other person knows their meaning.
DevX101 16y ago
With the industrial revolution, there was a massive shift among the lower/lower-middle classes from farming to manufacturing. Where will this large group of people who lost their jobs in the recent productivity surge go now? I don't think everyone enjoys or is cut out for computer based or intellectual work and there should be a viable option for 'hands-on' people to earn a livable wage. I spoke to an American businessman that did some work in China and he mentioned that if you invented a new technology that was highly productive and removed the need for a lot of manpower, you'd have a tough time getting that pass the government. For them, having jobs for the 1+ billion Chinese is a top priority, even if they have to sacrifice some productivity to get there. Productivity shouldn't be pursued at all expenses. Sometimes inefficiencies are good (see the U.S. political system of checks and balances, redundant systems in engineering). When the car industry/steel industry was bustling in the U.S., many of those lower-middle class workers bought homes, cars, televisions and created a market for financial and high-tech products. If this segment of society can't be integrated into the economy, I fear there will be long term negative impact on the demand for products that many of us here build.
- tomjen3 16y ago
  The only reason the checks and balances were added was because the Founders knew what the Gracchus brothers, Sulla, Marius and Cesar did to the Roman Republic. Look there is no way to say this nicely, but if those people can't get over their issues of the lost paradise thats just too bad. There are plenty of hands-on jobs left: snow needs to be removed, toilets cleaned, windows polished, etc. And no these jobs may not allow you to live a middle class lifestyle in 2010-2020, but they will allow you to live better than in the sixties. Half of the houses then didn't indoor bathrooms and medical care for something like cancer would be a joke compared to what we can do today. But hey lets all go and complain.
  - knowtheory 16y ago
    You are not going to make a wage above the poverty line doing those jobs though. Together the manufacturing sector and unions managed to drive wages and benefits into a local maximum, and were unable to find a way out. Also i further disagree with the notion that it'll let you live better than in the 60s, for a variety of reasons including poorer access to nutrition, lack of public transport, and that society has shifted away from outdoor activities.
dougabug 16y ago
Steel production in the US is one tenth the level of steel production in China (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_steel_production http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_steel_prod...). Perhaps I'm naive, but I'm inclined to believe that their industrial manufacturing level now vastly outstrips our own.
- jonknee 16y ago
  ... And there are a lot more planes made in the US than China. Neither of these things have much to do with which country has a larger total manufacturing base.
  - brg 16y ago
    With the commercial airline plant opening in Shanghai, I see this too changing.
knowtheory 16y ago
These are pretty graphs, but without a discussion of how the data was collected and what it means, i find it somewhat difficult to determine if the blog author's analysis is correct. Even hitting the original homepage for the data isn't very helpful (at a cursory glance): http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/INDPRO http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/INDPRO What counts as being manufactured in America? Does US assembly of parts made in other locales count? Because if it were to be the case that automated assembly of things made in China count, then productivity/efficiency could be seen as increasing, even though the majority of a product was created and built elsewhere. Anybody know?
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  Your link doesn't point to the original homepage of the data. Click "Release" then "Link", then "Documentation", you get the answer. http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g17/ http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g17/
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
Perceval 16y ago
What this post also misses is the declining socio-political power of manufacturing jobs. Two more charts are necessary: 1) the declining share of the total workforce made up by industrial labor, and 2) the declining share of unionized labor. Even if the absolute numbers of manufacturing jobs had remained steady from the 1950s to the present, the stagnation in absolute numbers would simply be hiding a rather large relative decline.
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  Assuming I don't consider manufacturing unions to be my political cronies (which I don't), why should I care about the declining political power of manufacturing unions?
  - Perceval 16y ago
    I'm not particularly pro-union either. But, the article's author attempts to distinguish between two things: U.S. manufacturing output (its productivity in terms of the value of goods made); and, the absolute number of manufacturing jobs. By doing so, he's trying to counter some of the popular perception that "U.S. manufacturing is gone." We are still a manufacturing powerhouse, but we are no longer adding manufacturing jobs. In fact we can make the same or greater amount of goods (by value) with the same amount or fewer manufacturing employees. So the perception is that U.S. manufacturing is in decline, because the number of manufacturing jobs stagnated from the 1950s to the 2000s. But those are only absolute numbers. The real story is that by the 1970s already U.S. manufacturing was perceived as being in decline. I'm speculating that we could understand the provenance of that perception by looking at two more graphs: percentage of workforce in manufacturing, and percentage of workforce in (industrial) unions. Why do these two graphs serve as good indicators of the nation-wide perception of manufacturing decline? The first because the relative share of jobs held in manufacturing is just as important as the absolute numbers in terms of social weight, clout, and awareness. The union chart more specifically would show the decline in political-economic clout held by people in the manufacturing sector, most precipitously (I would speculate) in the 1980s. Without fresh members, closed shops, local chapters, and substantial union bloc voting, the socio-political place of unions in the day-to-day fabric of American life begins to fade into the background. So, whatever one's politics toward organized labor (present or historical), I think such a chart would be illustrative of why there is a popular perception that "U.S. manufacturing is gone."
FD3SA 16y ago
This is an extremely cogent article on the unemployment issue. It appears the US needs to seriously start considering the structural unemployment that results from accelerating efficiency gains brought on by technological progress. Although I am a huge proponent of free markets, I've always worried what would happen when the radical pace of technological change outpaced the average person's marketable skills. My take on this is that human abilities are normally distributed, and the average employable person lies right at the mean in ability. Technology, on the other hand, started at the far left of the ability curve and slowly began automating the most menial tasks. Over the last century, the mean technological ability line has inched ever closer to the mean human ability line, eliminating otherwise employable people from the market along the way. You don't have to be a Singularitarian to see that this line has already caught up to the mean human ability, as evidenced by the blue collar recession we have experienced recently. The problem is that about 68% of the human population lie within one standard deviation of the average. If you look at the income gap data, it appears there is a divergence occurring in job demand, where only the high skilled and certain non-automated low skilled jobs are in demand. The big fat middle of the distribution appears to have been automated, hence the lack of demand for blue collar jobs and the structural unemployment we see today. I would be curious to hear HN's opinions on how to deal with this issue. I am at a loss, as the foundation of the issue is based on the non-malleable human ability distribution and the ever accelerating pace of technological efficiency.
- sethg 16y ago
  There is a demand for medium skilled jobs. E.g., I see lots of ads for careers in “medical billing and coding”, which is not the sort of work that requires a bachelor’s degree, but you can’t just hire someone off the street to do, either.
nhebb 16y ago
Former Manufacturing Engineer here. One plant I worked for is gone. All 1000+ jobs are in China now. Another I worked at is half its former size locally, with the other half of the jobs shifted to Mexico. A third was a smaller plant, with only a few hundred workers but 5 unions. They still have an operation locally but shifted their growth operations to a right to work state. You could make all the charts you want that show some vague correlation and dismiss my statements as anecdotal, but in some areas the jobs have just gone and the anecdotes represent the lives of real people. The site linked to (ourfuture.org) is a progressive site, so I'll link to a conservative piece as a counter-argument. There has a been a significant difference in the manufacturing growth in right to work states vs forced unionization states: http://www.americansforprosperity.org/021909-right-work-and-productivity-numbers http://www.americansforprosperity.org/021909-right-work-and-... While the site I linked to tries to make a single issue of it, there has been a large scale shift from the rust belt to the sun belt in the last few decades. Right to work vs forced unionization is one issue, but I'm sure that state taxes and regulatory policies played a hand as well.

39 points by doki_pen 16y ago

Shouldn't the title read "its" instead of "it's"? Sorry if it seems like nitpicking, but as a non-native English speaker I find it weird how often this issue comes up. If any native speaker here has any idea why this particular mistake is so prevalent, I'd be very interested.

mberning 16y ago
You are correct, in the case of "it's" the apostrophe doesn't indicate possession, but rather a contraction of 'it is'. I think it is a confusing edge case, which English has many of.
- NickPollard 16y ago
  Yes, it's one of English's many confusing edge cases, as normally an apostrophe does indicate posession - you would say "David's book", or "Sarah's pc" - so this catches many people out (including me, quite often).
- bpyne 16y ago
  I wouldn't qualify it as an edge case. It was more of a change in philosophy about teaching kids to spell, which is something like "kids should spell it the way it sounds". The change started in the US at least 15 years ago. When I went through elementary school > 30 years ago, not using an apostrophe for a contraction caused a reduction in grade. Also, contractions were disallowed in formal writing. For instance, using a contraction in a paper was a reduction in grade. Changing times and philosophies.
forgottenpaswrd 16y ago
Shouldn't the title read: "But jobs are" without uppercase and the "it's".
- podperson 16y ago
  No, "But its jobs are" would match the intent. Saying "But jobs are" would be a more general statement.
oscardelben 16y ago
I'm a non-native English speaker as well. More than this specific example I hate when someone uses then instead of than, because it often makes the sentence hard to understand.
raganwald 16y ago
As long as we're getting one nit, let's get two of them: it should be "its" with a lower-case "i" instead of "It's." "Isn't" should also be in lower case, "isn't." Even when composing a title with capitals, not all words should be capitalized. Setting "isn't" and "its" in lower-case makes the title easier to read and draws the eyes to the capitalized words that convey more meaning.
- doki_pen 16y ago
  Sorry, I really should know better. I've fixed it.
  - raganwald 16y ago
    I wouldn't sweat it, I strongly suspect that little elegant guidelines like this are slowly falling into disuse. English is a "living language," which means that it sometimes grabs a beer, goes out back, has a smoke, and vomits in the gutter.
saturdaysaint 16y ago
It's a pretty easy typo to make. I was an English major in college and am still fairly conscientious about these things, but our entire culture of quick text-messages, status updates, and all the of-the-moment acronyms that those entail is fairly antithetical to any kind of grammarian proof reading. Educated people often intentionally dispense with the apostrophe simply to save time, safely assuming the other person knows their meaning.

DevX101 16y ago

With the industrial revolution, there was a massive shift among the lower/lower-middle classes from farming to manufacturing. Where will this large group of people who lost their jobs in the recent productivity surge go now? I don't think everyone enjoys or is cut out for computer based or intellectual work and there should be a viable option for 'hands-on' people to earn a livable wage. I spoke to an American businessman that did some work in China and he mentioned that if you invented a new technology that was highly productive and removed the need for a lot of manpower, you'd have a tough time getting that pass the government. For them, having jobs for the 1+ billion Chinese is a top priority, even if they have to sacrifice some productivity to get there. Productivity shouldn't be pursued at all expenses. Sometimes inefficiencies are good (see the U.S. political system of checks and balances, redundant systems in engineering). When the car industry/steel industry was bustling in the U.S., many of those lower-middle class workers bought homes, cars, televisions and created a market for financial and high-tech products. If this segment of society can't be integrated into the economy, I fear there will be long term negative impact on the demand for products that many of us here build.

tomjen3 16y ago
The only reason the checks and balances were added was because the Founders knew what the Gracchus brothers, Sulla, Marius and Cesar did to the Roman Republic. Look there is no way to say this nicely, but if those people can't get over their issues of the lost paradise thats just too bad. There are plenty of hands-on jobs left: snow needs to be removed, toilets cleaned, windows polished, etc. And no these jobs may not allow you to live a middle class lifestyle in 2010-2020, but they will allow you to live better than in the sixties. Half of the houses then didn't indoor bathrooms and medical care for something like cancer would be a joke compared to what we can do today. But hey lets all go and complain.
- knowtheory 16y ago
  You are not going to make a wage above the poverty line doing those jobs though. Together the manufacturing sector and unions managed to drive wages and benefits into a local maximum, and were unable to find a way out. Also i further disagree with the notion that it'll let you live better than in the 60s, for a variety of reasons including poorer access to nutrition, lack of public transport, and that society has shifted away from outdoor activities.

dougabug 16y ago

Steel production in the US is one tenth the level of steel production in China (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_steel_production http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_steel_prod...). Perhaps I'm naive, but I'm inclined to believe that their industrial manufacturing level now vastly outstrips our own.

jonknee 16y ago
... And there are a lot more planes made in the US than China. Neither of these things have much to do with which country has a larger total manufacturing base.
- brg 16y ago
  With the commercial airline plant opening in Shanghai, I see this too changing.

knowtheory 16y ago

These are pretty graphs, but without a discussion of how the data was collected and what it means, i find it somewhat difficult to determine if the blog author's analysis is correct. Even hitting the original homepage for the data isn't very helpful (at a cursory glance): http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/INDPRO http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/INDPRO What counts as being manufactured in America? Does US assembly of parts made in other locales count? Because if it were to be the case that automated assembly of things made in China count, then productivity/efficiency could be seen as increasing, even though the majority of a product was created and built elsewhere. Anybody know?

yummyfajitas 16y ago
Your link doesn't point to the original homepage of the data. Click "Release" then "Link", then "Documentation", you get the answer. http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g17/ http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g17/

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

Perceval 16y ago

What this post also misses is the declining socio-political power of manufacturing jobs. Two more charts are necessary: 1) the declining share of the total workforce made up by industrial labor, and 2) the declining share of unionized labor. Even if the absolute numbers of manufacturing jobs had remained steady from the 1950s to the present, the stagnation in absolute numbers would simply be hiding a rather large relative decline.

yummyfajitas 16y ago
Assuming I don't consider manufacturing unions to be my political cronies (which I don't), why should I care about the declining political power of manufacturing unions?
- Perceval 16y ago
  I'm not particularly pro-union either. But, the article's author attempts to distinguish between two things: U.S. manufacturing output (its productivity in terms of the value of goods made); and, the absolute number of manufacturing jobs. By doing so, he's trying to counter some of the popular perception that "U.S. manufacturing is gone." We are still a manufacturing powerhouse, but we are no longer adding manufacturing jobs. In fact we can make the same or greater amount of goods (by value) with the same amount or fewer manufacturing employees. So the perception is that U.S. manufacturing is in decline, because the number of manufacturing jobs stagnated from the 1950s to the 2000s. But those are only absolute numbers. The real story is that by the 1970s already U.S. manufacturing was perceived as being in decline. I'm speculating that we could understand the provenance of that perception by looking at two more graphs: percentage of workforce in manufacturing, and percentage of workforce in (industrial) unions. Why do these two graphs serve as good indicators of the nation-wide perception of manufacturing decline? The first because the relative share of jobs held in manufacturing is just as important as the absolute numbers in terms of social weight, clout, and awareness. The union chart more specifically would show the decline in political-economic clout held by people in the manufacturing sector, most precipitously (I would speculate) in the 1980s. Without fresh members, closed shops, local chapters, and substantial union bloc voting, the socio-political place of unions in the day-to-day fabric of American life begins to fade into the background. So, whatever one's politics toward organized labor (present or historical), I think such a chart would be illustrative of why there is a popular perception that "U.S. manufacturing is gone."

FD3SA 16y ago

This is an extremely cogent article on the unemployment issue. It appears the US needs to seriously start considering the structural unemployment that results from accelerating efficiency gains brought on by technological progress. Although I am a huge proponent of free markets, I've always worried what would happen when the radical pace of technological change outpaced the average person's marketable skills. My take on this is that human abilities are normally distributed, and the average employable person lies right at the mean in ability. Technology, on the other hand, started at the far left of the ability curve and slowly began automating the most menial tasks. Over the last century, the mean technological ability line has inched ever closer to the mean human ability line, eliminating otherwise employable people from the market along the way. You don't have to be a Singularitarian to see that this line has already caught up to the mean human ability, as evidenced by the blue collar recession we have experienced recently. The problem is that about 68% of the human population lie within one standard deviation of the average. If you look at the income gap data, it appears there is a divergence occurring in job demand, where only the high skilled and certain non-automated low skilled jobs are in demand. The big fat middle of the distribution appears to have been automated, hence the lack of demand for blue collar jobs and the structural unemployment we see today. I would be curious to hear HN's opinions on how to deal with this issue. I am at a loss, as the foundation of the issue is based on the non-malleable human ability distribution and the ever accelerating pace of technological efficiency.

sethg 16y ago
There is a demand for medium skilled jobs. E.g., I see lots of ads for careers in “medical billing and coding”, which is not the sort of work that requires a bachelor’s degree, but you can’t just hire someone off the street to do, either.

nhebb 16y ago

Former Manufacturing Engineer here. One plant I worked for is gone. All 1000+ jobs are in China now. Another I worked at is half its former size locally, with the other half of the jobs shifted to Mexico. A third was a smaller plant, with only a few hundred workers but 5 unions. They still have an operation locally but shifted their growth operations to a right to work state. You could make all the charts you want that show some vague correlation and dismiss my statements as anecdotal, but in some areas the jobs have just gone and the anecdotes represent the lives of real people. The site linked to (ourfuture.org) is a progressive site, so I'll link to a conservative piece as a counter-argument. There has a been a significant difference in the manufacturing growth in right to work states vs forced unionization states: http://www.americansforprosperity.org/021909-right-work-and-productivity-numbers http://www.americansforprosperity.org/021909-right-work-and-... While the site I linked to tries to make a single issue of it, there has been a large scale shift from the rust belt to the sun belt in the last few decades. Right to work vs forced unionization is one issue, but I'm sure that state taxes and regulatory policies played a hand as well.