I'm certain that it does; the argument is whether it is "bad" in a global sense. (It's bad for the US in the short term, and in the long term, we're all dead.)
The US got very good at producing food, and the result is low farm employment, low food prices, and too many monocultures and high-intensity operations that trade a few years of profits against long-term fertility. Corporations have few incentives to look many years into the future, and no incentive to clean up anything that can be externalized cheaper.
The US got very good at mechanization, and then at building tools for mechanization, and then at selling plans for building tools for mechanization... the low-wage jobs move to cheaper areas of the world.
Apple is a microcosm: what does it say on your shiny new white box? Designed in California. (Built in China, from components from Thailand and Taiwan, from materials mined all across Africa.)
But what replaces the low-wage jobs, when there are no factories, no farm jobs? Retail and service, and retail is being eaten by Walmart on one end and Amazon on the other.
It's worse than that. We "got good" at agriculture by industrializing it and concentrating most of it in arid regions.
Something like 80% of lettuce comes from the California desert and the declining water supply of the Colorado river. Much if your grain and soybean crop is being fed by groundwater in the Midwest where the aquifers are in decline. Meanwhile, prime farmland in the east is underutilized because the plots are too small. My supermarket in New York is full of Mexican and Californian tomatoes in mid august!
That's a fundamentally bad situation, and I think the potential consequences are obvious.
That's a simplified version of what Cowen's arguing here, but frankly it's a strange argument to make.
India reverted to subsistence farming after UK trade policy essentially forced them to buy cotton spun by machines in Manchester instead of cotton made by hand-looms in nearby craft villages. But we're talking about uneducated, illiterate cottage industry workers reverting to the only other trade they could participate in, in a country whose social and economic mobility was nonexistant even before the British started arriving.
It really couldn't be much further from the US outsourcing menial production line jobs to developing countries whilst keeping the cushier design, marketing, management, finance and logistics jobs for its own educated workforce.
I'd be interested to see if the United States has actually "deindustrialized" in the sense of doing less material production, in terms of either metric tons of goods or dollar value, or whether it has just specialized in cutting the labor force while keeping production levels high.
Mind, I also find the prominence of "back to the land!" sentiments extremely worrisome.
that there was a big drop due to falling demand in the 2008 recession but before that production was climbing fine in spite of China et al. Not quite sure how production is measured here - $ value I'm guessing