> Rampant cost cutting, outsourcing, and lack of protecting domestic production has absolutely devastated US manufacturing.
This is utterly false thing that you learn if only read news articles. The value and quantity of manufacturing is now the highest it has ever been in the US.
What has declined is the number of workers and the share of GDP. This applies to almost all OECD countries. As economies change from industrial to post-industrial, the share of manufacturing declines naturally because manufacturing productivity increases.
Agriculture is something like 3% of the GDP, yet developed countries produce more agricultural products than they did when 90% of the economy was agriculture. The same thing is happening to manufacturing.
> This is utterly false thing that you learn if only read news articles. The value and quantity of manufacturing is now the highest it has ever been in the US.
I've seen it first hand. I've talked with people that have been impacted by it. I've also seen the corporate slight of hand that tries to disguise it. Components manufactured in China, shipped to Mexico for assembly, then shipped to the US to have some decorative panels and stickers slapped on so they can put a "made in USA" sticker on the side.
Go grab virtually anything from around your house (excluding food) and it's more likely than not that that thing was manufactured in whole or in part outside the US. That didn't used to be the case. Coming out of WW2 it was rare for people to own non-domestically produced goods.
This isn't a case of US manufacturing just being so ridiculously efficient that you just don't need many companies making things. That might hold water if most goods were still manufactured in the US, but they aren't. Cars are about the only manufactured consumer good still made in the US, and even they are quite often assembled in Mexico. Pretty much any electronic device is made in China.
Here's a case study, Ikea which is a very popular furniture manufacturer (among other things) mostly assembles their products in Mexico and China. They do have some US manufacturing, but that's largely because they acquired rights to some large swaths of woodland and it makes sense to process and assemble that on site.
To be clear, you mentioned agriculture, and yes, the US does have a thriving agriculture sector, but agriculture isn't manufacturing.
The US screwed up badly when it let basic manufacturing get outsourced. When the factories making screws and transistors are all based in other countries, eventually all the other factories are going to follow them.
You can't quantify manufacturing by looking around. What you see is cheap consumer products with low value added.
If you follow value chains for products manufactured in China, you quickly notice China imports high value added manufacturing products from other countries (including the US) then assembles them with cheap workforce and adds cheap components.
>Manufacturing can be for goods that you don't find in your house?
>If you look at the German mittelstand there's a lot of businesses that make stuff for some unknown-to-the-public industrial niche.
>I'm guessing the US also has a bunch of those.
And that is exactly why he said "from your house". Home goods lend themselves very, very well to outsourcing because low initial cost is such a key design criteria and they tend to have a density and packaging requirements that make them convenient to ship. If you browse through the McMaster or Grainger catalogs you'll find that a huge number of things (maybe not a majority but likely the largest minority) are made in the US and the rest are made all over the world.
You’re talking about cheap consumer products that will always be made cheaply.
No one is going to make a consumer product like they used to. Take power tools and kitchen appliances for example. They don’t have to be make entirely of metal when plastic will do just fine for home use.
Like Germany we want to keep high quality manufacturing at home.
This is utterly false thing that you learn if only read news articles. The value and quantity of manufacturing is now the highest it has ever been in the US.
What has declined is the number of workers and the share of GDP. This applies to almost all OECD countries. As economies change from industrial to post-industrial, the share of manufacturing declines naturally because manufacturing productivity increases.
Agriculture is something like 3% of the GDP, yet developed countries produce more agricultural products than they did when 90% of the economy was agriculture. The same thing is happening to manufacturing.