> I've now been around long enough to remember people saying this 10-20 years ago. Seems to be plenty of manufacturing still happening.

“Plenty” but still less overall than 10-20 years ago, 30, 40, 50 years ago. There’s a quite clear trend to zero here.

Declining absolutely does not mean “clear trend to zero”. There are a great many things which decline for a long time, but have a lower limit.

Bit pedantic there, aren't you? I suppose as long as a single factory is still open in the US we're doing just fine, it's not zero, right?

The amount of farmers is also declining, is that also an issue?

The only trend is the amount of labor in manufacturing. the US produces just as much or more than any other year. However we do it on far less labor.

Not sure how this comforts anyone. We need labor, there aren't enough spa management and pet groomer positions to build an economy upon. What good does it do for anyone that we manufacture more, if there aren't enough good-paying jobs to go around to support a broad consumer base for those same products you say are being manufactured without (much) labor?

Why would any foreign nation even want to manufacture goods to ship here, if there's nothing much to buy with our currency? If our currency does devalue, we run the risk of not being able to import what we need, and not being able to afford to tool up to manufacture it domestically. And yet trends are clear that in many industrial sectors US manufacturing has already fallen to what might as well be zero.

We need jobs for everyone for various reasons. However we do not need factory jobs for everyone. The manufacture more with less people means those other people can move on to other jobs. They can start another factory to make goods.

There are plenty of jobs. Every person who isn't manufacturing is a person who can do something else. A modern car uses a lot more engineers. While we don't need many spa mangers, it is nice that spas exist and so some of those spa managers are needed.

Don't forget that people don't really want factory jobs, which suck; they want union jobs that pay well and don't kill them.

> We need labor, there aren't enough spa management and pet groomer positions to build an economy upon.

Is it your impression that spa management and pet care are the only working-class service jobs available?

Most of the trades are categorized as service professions in the statistics. So is construction.

You're expecting that in the coming months the demand for master plumbers will double or something? Or are you saying that the existing demand is already so high that it can do more than provide some fraction of one percent of the jobs that our nation of 300-million-ish needs to have a strong economy?

I think we both agree that one of us has unrealistic impressions of the big picture here. When we regularly here of layoffs that affect hundreds and thousands of jobs, welders and electricians can't absorb those unemployed to any great degree. Nor all of the trades put together.

But why do you expect manufacturing to do that? It's just not as labor intensive as it used to be, and if there's a recession demand for manufactured goods falls, resulting in layoffs.

This graph of US manufacturing output in gross dollars suggests otherwise: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/USA/uni...

If you could explain why it’s trending to zero when the dollar value of American manufacturing outputs keeps rising, I’d appreciate it.

There are plenty of other charts that contradict you on the St Louis Fed FRED website.

> gross dollars

So, not inflation adjusted. Also doesn't capture the mix of what's being produced, i.e., a shift towards only manufacturing high value items versus being more broadly diversified and manufacturing things along a range of price points. In other words, a complete hollowing out of our manufacturing base.

Your same link shows $1.38T in 1997. Which is $2.77T today. In other words, DOWN in inflation adjusted terms from nearly 30 years ago.

"Data are in current U.S. dollars." Plus, the growth has been large enough to outpace inflation except for the last couple years.

The percent of GDP has been dropping but that is just that GDP has been growing faster. Which means that the US has been doing more valuable things than making stuff.

Paul Krugman made this point in a podcast with Ezra Klein. People remember a time when manufacturing was 30% of the economy, but that will never return, because the economy grew far more than our appetites for stuff. His estimate was that even if it worked and jobs returned, you'd be talking about going from 10% of GDP to 12 or 13%.

> So, not inflation adjusted.

All dollar values on that chart are adjusted for inflation.

> Also doesn't capture the mix of what's being produced, i.e., a shift towards only manufacturing high value items versus being more broadly diversified and manufacturing things along a range of price points.

The chart does not capture the trend you speak of, assuming it exists.

> In other words, a complete hollowing out of our manufacturing base.

That’s not how I would put it, if you want to look at it through that lens, it’s your right.

I would say we manufacture things higher up the value chain and use the dollars we earn from making that stuff to import cheaper foreign commodities instead of manufacturing them here and using dollars to buy American made clothes and shoes and other commodity items at a much higher price than we can buy them from other countries.

We also export services and receive dollars in return, this is much more lucrative that manufacturing imo.