Molson Hart

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.

U.S. labor is expensive so the input mix here will naturally favor lots of capital investments, even if we brought back much of the manufacturing capacity that was offshored. We'd have to impose grossly inefficient subsidies/tariffs to restore manufacturing's labor share here.

Over time, as technology progresses, the distortions from these policies would get bigger and more expensive.

Those so called grossly inefficient subsidies and tariffs are what built Japan, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Germany, and even the US into great nations. We deindustrialize at our peril. There's a good book called How Asia Works about this.

Thanks. Will check it out. But, I will point out that the U.S., though deindustrialized, is the most innovative economy in the world. Other countries, including China, want to be more like us.