Molson Hart

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.

That's a fair point of view. But long term we can't sustain a big manufacturing labor force for the same reason we can't sustain a big rural labor force. Technology is inevitably making most people obsolete.

I agree that there's a good chance that we cannot sustain a large manufacturing labor force, but disagree with the reasoning. I think the threat of automation in manufacturing is grossly exaggerated. Automation looks like a huge threat to manufacturing jobs in the US because

, in order for manufacturing work to stay in the US, it had to be automated. When you walk into a US factory you see robots, but you don't see all the jobs we've sent to Asia.