My understanding is that a lot of the US' manufacturing output is an artifact of how agencies do statistical adjustments for improvements in computer chips.

From your link: the US made up 28% of manufacturing in 2002, dipped steeply, and then rose back to 18%. That's a huge loss of manufacturing. Especially when you consider that the manufacturing activity in China is, in large part, US companies gutting their own operations to save a buck. The short-sighted, "well educated" Harvard MBA bean counters aren't taught in school what comes next. After they gut and globalized, China steals their IP and floods the market with clones under a dozen shadow brands.

The bean counters got their salaries and bonuses. Why should they care what happens next?

It seems to me that historically the real controls on our business models were social, not regulatory. And with ethics and conscience removed, we've become a society being slowly devoured by a close relative of paper-clip optimizer AIs, running on distributed and fungible human wetware.

It never dropped in absolute terms. It’s been on a constant upward trend. As a proportion of global manufacturing it dropped but that’s inevitable with other economies growing if you’re as big a part of the global economy as the US is.

Tell that to the rust belt.

Huh, it's strange that they'd consider the EU a "single" manufacturer for the purposes of that list.

It's helpful to do that because it provides like-with-like comparisons.

Functionally the EU operates with zero internal customs etc, free movement of people etc. It also represents a population group of a similar size to the US and China.

In the same way, breaking down manufacturing in the US by state, and comparing each state to China is not helpful, so dealing with each European country invidually in the comparison would not be helpful.

Shouldn’t Canada and Mexico be combined with the United States based on those criteria? NAFTA is still a thing.

I thought of that as well. But while there is a mostly free movement of goods, there isn't a free movement of people.

Plus from a motivational point of view adding in Mexico and Canada does nothing for those keen to improve the state of US manufacturing. Inside Europe there would be similar reports comparing the individual countries - and I suspect at the US state level there might be studies as well.

With the free movement of people though internal competition is less beneficial. (although geographic spread is still desirable.)