The appeal of MAGA is an imagined past where America used to make things, before globalization took all the manufacturing overseas. Today I learned that the basis for that belief is just wrong. The graph above shows why. America is still making stuff — about ten times more today than we made in 1947, in inflation-adjusted dollars. That's stuff made right her in the USA, not in China. What gives? Why don't we have ten times more Americans working to produce those goods? That's because of a growth in productivity. While we're making ten times more, the number of Americans working in manufacturing has stayed pretty much flat from 1947 to 2025. Productivity growth through technology, not globalization, is the more important story here.
I don't have the graph to show it, but productivity is going up in China, too. It's skyrocketing. AI is accelerating the pace. Factory automation is putting a lot of Chinese workers out of work. But like in America, they are finding new jobs. Increasingly, it's not the poorly paid Chinese worker why China seems to be taking over the world market for manufactured goods. It's China's growth in productivity that's responsible, just like what drove America to be able to produce ten times the amount of manufactured goods with no increase in manufacturing jobs since 1947. America needs to quit whining about China and start emulating them. And that's what I learned today.
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