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.
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.
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.