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.
Articles like this are really just propaganda (wishful thinking) trying to soften the blow of Baumol’s Cost Disease:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
Industries that benefit heavily from automation reduce costs over time. Industries that rely heavily on services (that require people to perform them) increase costs over time.
If you can somehow convert a big chunk of your economy into services from automated production, you can smooth out the difference in that economic curve. In theory, that means the rich (capitalists) can continue to get richer while everyone else’s salaries flatten out.
It’s total bullshit. The only logical end result of such a situation is the rich getting eaten sooner rather than later.
Smart rich people are (right now) lobbying to get their taxes increased to pay for a better social safety net. Stupid rich people are lobbying for bullshit like converting everything into a subscription economy.