“Contrary to myths that we’ve stopped ‘making’ things in the United States, we already manufacture a lot of stuff here. In fact, we manufacture nearly the most ‘stuff’ on record, as measured by the inflation-adjusted value of those products. We just happen to make that stuff with fewer workers than we used to, because technological advances have led to huge productivity gains.”
– Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post, September 8, 2022
U.S. manufacturing labor productivity since peak*: +4.00%
U.S. manufacturing employment since then: -7.18%
U.S. after-inflation manufacturing production since then: -3.58%
*December, 2007
(Sources: “The myth of the manufacturing comeback,” by Catherine Rampell, The Washington Post, September 8, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/08/biden-manufacturing-made-america/; “Labor productivity (output per hour),” Series Id: PRS 30006093, Major Sector Productivity and Costs, Databases, Tables & Calculators by Subject, Data Tools, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, https://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet; “All employees, thousands, manufacturing, seasonally adjusted,” Series Id: CES3000000001, Employment, Hours, and Earnings from the Current Employment Statistics survey (National), Ibid.; & “Industrial Production, Seasonally Adjusted,” Data for Tables 1, 2, and 10 (to July 2022), Industrial Production: Market, Industry Groups, and Individual Series, Historical Data: Tables 1, 2, and 10, Industrial Production and Capacity Utilization – G.17, Data, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System,https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g17/ipdisk/ip_sa.txt)
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