2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Mr. Sanders peddles fiction on free trade [View all]Recursion
(56,582 posts)First off, as a very long term trend, manufacturing employment has been falling as a percent of the total economy since, well, really the industrial revolution started, but it's been particularly pronounced since world war 2, and it's in fact one of the key metrics we look at in determining that an economy is "developed":
Meanwhile, the amount of stuff we actually manufacture has gone way, way up:
(Before you start: no, flipping burgers does not count as "manufacturing", though actually making the pink slime burger patties are made from in a factory does count as "manufacturing", because that's exactly what it is.)
The reason this is possible is that technology is making an individual worker able to produce a lot more stuff:
Not only that, but employees are getting more hours than they used to:
At higher wages:
This is part of a much larger trend of steady wage increases except for an anomalous period between about 1970 and 1990.
That's median wages for all non-supervisory employment, not just manufacturing. In fact, manufacturing is such a small part of the workforce that its trend line looks flat:
And the big result of this is that median real personal income is much, much higher than it was before NAFTA:
(Before you start: "real" means it's adjusted for inflation; "median" means it's not impacted by people like Bill Gates making a billion dollars a year.)
If the time since NAFTA has been a disaster, it's a disaster we could use a lot more of.