Manufacturing Myth

How often do you hear " This county will never be great again until be bring back manufacturing!", or “Our problem is we just don't make any thing here, everything comes from China". These ideas seem to be common knowledge, but the fact is that it’s false.



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 You can see that US Manufacturing output is the fourth largest economy in the world. So it’s pretty clear that we make things. In fact we make as many goods as Germany’s entire economy.

Still you can’t deny that manufacturing jobs have declined. Why is this? Technology, increased efficiency is to blame. How many fewer people are required on an automotive assembly line today than in Henry Ford’s era, or even 30 years ago? Automated processes have replaced workers.  This isn’t a bad thing, the American economy is still sound, and we still make things, just more efficiently.  It can sound heartless when you tell a laid off worker that it’s good a robot took his job, it’s not good for him. But a business’s role is not to provide jobs to employees, but to make money.

There is benefit to the economy at large when goods are produced more efficiently. Namely, they become cheaper. Technology is the engine of efficiency, and it is not a bad thing.