Living standards have not improved for decades and there's lots of research showing that it actually has slightly declined.
Somewhere this profit must end up, it can't just vanish? What I believe is they count stuff like manufacturing of iPhones in China where the profits never arrive in the US.
Also a comment below the article points something out that I'm going to quote:
"The gross value of production in 1986 (T50030) is $2,214,450,700,000. Today, it's $3,641,055,400,000. So it hasn't doubled or tripled at all. In fact, that's only 75% of what we were producing in 1986, because when you adjust the 1986 figure for inflation, we would have to be at $4,870,130,000,000 JUST TO BE EVEN! It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure it out. In 1986 we imported $986,522,790,000 (adjusted for inflation) in goods. This year, we are on track to have $2,892,000,000,000 in imports. That extra $2T in imported goods are goods we used to make here in the US. So in an economy with a total output of $16.8 trillion, we've handed $2T of our industrial production off to other countries. That's $2T in manufacturing output, or 38 million jobs with a starting pay of $33k. "
His numbers are correct: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GVIPT50030S
And then the article states something that I find very concerning:
"The crude oil may come from Canada, Saudi Arabia or North Dakota, but it’s refined right here in America.
Refined petroleum products — such as gasoline, fuel oil, jet fuel and liquefied refinery gases — are America’s top manufactured product, with a value of shipments going out the factory door of nearly $700 billion in 2014, more than four times as much as the No. 2 product: light trucks."
If that is true, then the US is in even greater troubles than I had thought, because it doesn't seem to be an industry that is so hard to copy that Saudi Arabia couldn't do it themselves if needed.
It's a myth. See this for example: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-manufacturing-dead-outpu...