The dream of greasy overalls is driven by nostalgia and doesn’t justify policies that harm US consumers

The dream of greasy overalls is driven by nostalgia and doesn’t justify policies that harm US consumers

The exhortations to protect America’s industrial muscle have resonated in the US at least since maverick presidential candidate Ross Perot brought up the supposed “giant sucking sound” of jobs pulled to Mexico by the NAFTA trade agreement back in 1993.

They flourished under Donald Trump’s first presidency and his promise to restore jobs lost to trade agreements. Joe Biden, too, put “rebuilding the backbone of America: manufacturing, unions and the middle class” at the center of his agenda. And in 2024, Trump reheated his old promise that “jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country”.

There is an undeniable appeal to the hard hat and the grease-stained overalls; to the sweat on the brow of hard men in vintage posters; to the virtue of a hard day’s labor on the production line. But the American political class would do well to overcome its nostalgia for the past and forget about promises to make manufacturing great again.

  • aramis87@fedia.io
    6·
    7 hours ago

    The decline in manufacturing, however, is less a story about policy blunders than one about the long progress of the US economy, which has to a large extent graduated out of producing stuff like phones and cars and into the delivery of services, like finance and healthcare – a process similar to that followed by other countries that moved up the ladder of success.

    Oh, ffs! You’d think that a British journalist focused on economics and politics would get this right, but apparently not.

    The Republicans look back at America’s manufacturing boom of the 1950’s with nostalgia, and they completely ignore the reasons for the boom - namely, the devastation from WWII. South America, Africa and the Southern Pacific countries didn’t have big manufacturing economies. A significant number of other countries (Russia, Japan, most of Europe, etc) were physically devastated by the war and needed to rebuild from scratch.

    With China focused inward and India focused on independence (and both countries recovering from the war), there simply wasn’t another large, heavily populated country to compete - New Zealand, Australia, Canada, etc, simply didn’t have the population to build and staff factories to the extent that the States could. That’s where the US post-war manufacturing boom came from: the war itself.

    And the boom died out because other countries recovered from the war and built their own manufacturing bases. That boom was never going to last, and it’s unlikely to ever be repeated, and I just wish that people would realize that and move on from that dream.

    • MareOfNights@discuss.tchncs.de
      1·
      6 hours ago

      That quote is not related to your comment, tho.

      The quote is saying that manufacturing is work less developed countries do. And you explain why the US developed so fast.

      • aramis87@fedia.io
        2·
        6 hours ago

        My point is that the big manufacturing boom in the US in the 1950s was a direct result of the devastation from WWII, and the US being the one less affected country that wasn’t facing inner turmoil (China, India) and that had a lot of resources and a lot of population. And that the decline of American manufacturing has less to do with the US transitioning to a service oriented economy, and more to do with the rest of the world rebuilding their economies and industrial bases after the war. When you’re the only large-scale industrial manufacturer in the world, of course you do well. When you have to compete with a bunch of other countries, you actually need to compete.