Molson Hart

It’s up there but I think deindustrialization and loss of opportunities for the 99% are bigger.

I'm not convinced deindustrialization was any worse than deruralization. The policy failure was letting the winners (poor foreigners and rich Americans) reap all or most of the gains without offsetting the loser's losses (lower and middle class Americans).

No problem with deruralization. Those former farmers worked in factories. They had a path, but no longer. Agree with your second point. I had a hand in it. I'm the internet generation of that cohort.

The US as a manufacturing superpower is romanticized for the wrong reasons. Manufacturing jobs weren't better because they were manufacturing, they were better because workers had stronger bargaining power through unions, legislation, etc. Those are mostly gone.

Do you have a stat on what percentage of america's [manufacturing] labor force was unionized in the 70s? I bet it was the minority. We lost plenty of good-paying non-union manufacturing jobs to deindustrialization, too. Those workers had more bargaining power than they do today.

In the 1973, it was almost 40%. It's declined rapidly since then. Even when union affiliation is a minority, it can exert substantial upward pressure on wages. https://www.unionstats.com/Private-Sector-Manufacturing.htm …

I agree that union membership helped US labor's wages before it became easy to outsource. However, I also believe that, even in a US that banned unions, we'd be better off as a more industrialized nation, both for manufacturing labor and the country as a whole.