US Manufacturing Jobs: The Long Transition

The basic patterns of US manufacturing jobs are fairly well-known. Here’s a figure showing total US manufacturing jobs over the last half-century or so: more-or-less flat from the 1970s up through 2000, then a decline from 2000 to about 2010, and more-or-less flat since then. Part of what happened in the early 2000s was a surge of imports from China, after China became a member of the World Trade Organization. Another part was that US workers who might otherwise have been in manufacturing jobs shifted to house-building during that boom-and-bust of US housing in the lead-up to the Great Recession. Part of the reason was US manufacturing firms making much more widespread use of robotics. Putting manufacturing jobs in the context of total jobs in the US economy gives something of a different impression. This figure shows that even when total manufacturing jobs seemed to be more-or-less holding their own from 1970 up to about 2000, other jobs in the US economy were actually growing. The…