While this year’s Democratic and Republican platforms don’t agree on much, aside from that the other party’s candidate will drive America into ruin, there is at least one area of unanimity: a phrase like “one of the best ways to innovate, prosper, and create good-paying jobs is to make more in America” could be an expression of Trumpian jingoism, Sandersonian egalitarianism, or mainstream thought of either party. (That particular line is from the Democrats’ platform.) There is a bipartisan consensus that the shrinking of American manufacturing is a central story (or even the central story) of America today. No President has ever used the word “manufacturing” in his State of the Union messages as often as President Obama has. Donald Trump put the word “make” on the front of his cap, and at the center of his campaign.
Such emotional, political, and even existential attachment to manufacturing is strange, however. Manufacturing employs less than nine per cent of America’s workers, and other American industries are flourishing, here and abroad. Ask a Chinese amusement-park owner competing against the new Shanghai Disney Resort, a French taxi driver protesting Uber’s incursions into Paris, a Saudi prince fighting for market share against Texas shale, or an Indian scientist dreaming of Harvard, and they will tell you a story of American entertainment, technology, energy, agribusiness, aerospace, military, and research in ascendancy. Indeed, since the global financial crisis, the entire U.S. economy, as slow-growing as it is, has been the envy of the developed world. But here in the U.S., we seem to ignore these other sectors in our constant cultural bemoaning of the decline of manufacturing. Manufacturing is like the Bible’s prodigal son—the wayward child that earns his father’s enthusiastic embrace even as the good child, seemingly unrecognized, dutifully succeeds.
For individuals who have lost factory jobs, it’s clear why a decline in manufacturing work matters. And for manufacturing-dependent communities, which have seen their buildings gutted, and their populations in rapid decline, our hearts break as consistently as our policies fail. Yet these are local stories in a complex and otherwise relatively healthy American economy. So why has the revival of manufacturing become the centerpiece of a national campaign and an urgent American priority?
The most discussed reason is the coinciding of a period, from the end of the Second World War through the nineteen-seventies, in which manufacturing jobs represented, on average, twenty-eight per cent of the workforce, and in which America had significantly lower income inequality. We collectively remember this as the American economic idyll, when a single factory job could afford a family a house in a safe neighborhood, two wide-finned cars, and maybe a cabin by a lake.
Yet the call for a return of the effects of the work (the cabin, etc.) seems to be confused, in our celebration of manufacturing, with the work itself. Yes, factory work is more subject than domestic services to competing supply from other countries; globalization is likely the chief cause of middle-class wage stagnation, one of the drivers of historical income inequality. But there isn’t anything inherent in working on an assembly line—as compared to, for example, being a medical-claims processor—that produces a middle-class life style. The training for both are likely similar, as are the educational requirements. The salaries for both are subject to the negotiating power of labor and to the laws of supply and demand. (Manufacturing jobs today are not particularly likely to be unionized: only ten per cent of manufacturing workers are represented by unions, compared to 7.4 per cent of private-sector workers as a whole and thirty-nine per cent of public-sector workers.) And whether or not American labor needs call for another factory worker or another claims processor doesn’t alter what is potentially the main driver of income inequality: the rising take of the very rich owing to new mores of corporate pay, the skim available from the massive growth of financial assets, tax policy, and more.
It’s also not clear if making more stuff here would actually create more jobs. America still produces 5.6 trillion dollars’ worth of stuff per year; according to U.N. data, American manufacturing, as a component of G.D.P. measured in constant dollars, has nearly doubled in two decades. Depending on how you measure it, the United States manufactures seventeen per cent of the world’s goods, more than four times America’s share of the world’s population. The so-called decline of American manufacturing is really about two things: first, it is about declining market share in the face of China, with the almost unfathomable rise in Chinese manufacturing output. (Excluding China, America’s manufacturing market share, as measured in constant-dollar G.D.P., hasn’t changed much in the past decade.) Second, it is about the decline of jobs. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are currently 12.3 million manufacturing jobs in the United States, or 8.5 per cent of the total non-farm workforce. This is down from the postwar peak, of 19.4 million jobs, in 1979, and of thirty-two per cent of the total workforce, in 1953. (The United States may have lost seven million manufacturing jobs since 1979, but, with a growing population and economy, it has added fifty-nine million non-manufacturing jobs in the same period of time.) And as much as the political narrative tells of workers losing their jobs to foreign competition, which is obviously true in some cases, the decline in those jobs is as much a function of automation as of global competition. Manufacturing jobs are declining everywhere in the world.
And yet, as a nation, we still yearn for more manufacturing jobs, not for more medical-claims processors or lab technicians—for our prodigal son, not the good son. Another reason for this, I suspect, is some subconscious unease with our digitized post-material economy. Many of us sigh when we see a two-year-old reach for an iPad instead of a crayon, or a musician reach for a laptop instead of a guitar. This angst bleeds into a worry that our economy, and our national existence, is following suit. Making a truck is real work. Adding numbers to a database is invisible—and try explaining it to your great-grandmother. It is also “unmanly,” and a macho celebration of “makers” has found its extreme in the form of Trump, a real man, an honorary blue-collar billionaire, a builder of things—skyscrapers, walls.
But again, that explanation doesn’t fully satisfy. Many of us clearly like to dance to the dude with the laptop. We embrace digitized post-material consumption. And our worries about being a non-making nation are cousins to the dirt-in-the-fingernails, farm-to-table ethos, which has some Americans now cultivating beets with the care formerly reserved for babies. Yet that call for greater appreciation for physical, tactile farm work hasn’t revived a new rural populism under a new William Jennings Bryan.
That kind of populism occurred more than a century ago. That is an important difference: I suspect that the relative recentness of the loss of manufacturing jobs, more than income inequality, and more than a discomfort with our digital age, is the biggest explanation for our manufacturing-centered populism. We bemoan losing American manufacturing jobs for no other reason than that we have lost them. Behavioral psychologists would label this the endowment effect. The parable of prodigal son better gets to the soul of the matter.
In Christianity, the main action of the parable is the forgiveness of the father and the redemption of the prodigal son after his years of bad choices and—as put with King Jamesian decorum—“riotous living.” In the case of U.S. manufacturing, some manufacturers succumbed to the lure of cheap outsourcing, some didn’t innovate quickly enough against foreign competition, and some were caught in forces outside their control. But for all these manufacturing prodigal sons, America would welcome them back, open-armed. Biblical commenters consider the other, good son whiny and priggish, cruelly lacking empathy for his brother. Yet it’s hard not to identify with the good son’s cry: “Look! All these years I’ve been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. But when this son of yours, who has squandered your property with prostitutes, comes home, you kill the fatted calf for him!”
The father has two responses to the good son which can help us think about America’s bipartisan wail for more manufacturing. Most famously, the father responds, “We had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.” We miss those factory towns, those factory jobs, those blue-collar lakeside communities, because we want to be whole. We miss them out of love.
But our problems and our inequalities will have to be solved by means other than nostalgia. The American industries that are succeeding—including highly automated manufacturers—will continue to do so, taking a greater share of national jobs, national wealth, and maybe the national self-image. The parable is relevant here, too. The father also answered the good son: “You are always with me, and everything I have is yours.”
