(What’s Left of) Our Economy: More Establishment Happy Talk About De-Industrialization

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Anne-Marie Slaughter, blue collar, Bureau of Labor Statistics, design, engineering, Madeleine Albright, manufacturing, New America, offshoring, research and development, STEM, Trade, white collar, {What's Left of) Our Economy

I’m all for looking on the sunny side of life. Making up the sunny side of life? Not so much. That’s why I find Anne-Marie Slaughter’s recent Financial Times column so disturbing. For the author – a contributing editor of the FT, the president of New America (a tech and offshoring industry-funded think tank in Washington, D.C.), and a former leading foreign policy adviser to President Obama) has just served up an exercise in economic hopium that is almost entirely fact-free, and that repeats a canard that was hopelessly out of date twenty years ago.

Slaughter’s fanciful claim? That the spread of the internet of things throughout American manufacturing is going to spur a revival of America’s hard-hit, industry-heavy midwestern Rust Belt. One main reason, according to the author:

“[T]he next phase of the digital revolution is the internet of things. The Midwest is the traditional home of makers — of cars, tractors, machines and household appliances. Companies such as Deere & Co, Carrier or Ford may have shifted manufacturing abroad, but the design, engineering and innovation is still concentrated back home. Those jobs may be less sexy than billion-dollar start-ups, but they will be stable and well paid. On Thanksgivings to come, Midwest cities seeking to grow their tech sectors should have more and more to be thankful for.”

Although the headline (which Slaughter probably isn’t responsible for) – “The internet of things helps spark a rust belt revival” – signals that the Midwestern renaissance is already well underway, the author herself is honest enough to specify in the text that the only metrics she presents show progress on this score limited to “a fraction of a percentage point.” But it would have been more honest to at least hint at all the data suggesting how pie-in-the-sky her prediction is over any foreseeable time frame.

For example, although there’s no authoritative source of information showing how many employees of manufacturing companies based in the United States (either U.S.- or foreign-owned) work in science and technology positions, numbers are available for the share of American manufacturing workers occupying both blue-collar and white-collar jobs. These aren’t definitive, because many of the white-collar jobs are administrative and management jobs having little or nothing to do with innovation, and because manufacturing companies have tried to eliminate as many as possible to maximize cost savings.

But it’s still surely revealing that, since the offshoring phase of U.S. trade policy officially began when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect at the beginning of 1994, American manufacturing employment falling outside the “nonsupervisory and production” category is down by 956,000 – or 20.45 percent. That’s a smaller hit than taken by industry’s blue-collar workforce – which is down by 39 percent, or 3.418 million. But over the last two-plus decades, the blue-collar/white-collar job split in manufacturing has barely budged, with the former’s share down from only 72.27 percent to 70.21 percent. Does that tell you a dramatic U-Turn is anywhere on the horizon?

Moreover, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (the source of the above figures) did take a cursory look at the employment of some types of engineers in various sectors within domestic manufacturing. It found that, in May, 2015, between about 38 percent and about 55 percent of the workforces in American information technology hardware production belonged in science and technology categories. But little of this type of manufacturing is located in the rust belt.

The only data set this same study contained that looked relevant to the midwest covered the increase in the number of mechanical engineers employed in the motor vehicle parts and various industrial machinery sectors. Only in motor vehicle parts did the workforces (modestly) exceed 10,000 – and this in an industry whose payrolls approached 564,000 that month, and whose total white-collar workforce came to just over 128,000.

Although it’s true that the statistics could be missing the kind of shift Slaughter expects (and her headline writer regards as already underway), anyone familiar with the way manufacturing typically works would understand why extreme skepticism is in order. In real-life manufacturing companies, and especially factories (as opposed to those imagined by so many think tankers and academics), production on the one hand and research and development etc on the other are rarely activities that are so sharply distinctive that one can readily take place around the world from another. In fact, they are so closely related that knowledge tends to flow back and forth between production line and lab in a continuous, interactive feedback loop. And it’s not remotely good enough to exchange this information electronically. That’s why, in sector after sector of manufacturing, when the production leaves the country, the research and development and design and engineering tend to follow.

And that’s why the only useful purpose served by Slaughter’s article – and the FT‘s decision to publish it – is reminding readers that, as long as American trade and other globalization policies keep needlessly fostering the export of manufacturing, offshoring interests, their hired guns in the think tank world, and their unwitting dupes in the press will strive to portray these losses as all for the best.

As my book, The Race to the Bottom made clear, it was a phony excuse for de-industrialization back in 1997, when former Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright touted the advent of high tech products “designed and begun in the United States and…manufactured in Asian countries,” and it’s no less dangerously off-base today.

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Im-Politic: Mainstream Media Again Foster NAFTA Myths and Think Tank Corruption

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Canada, donors, Google, Im-Politic, Japan, Korea, Mainstream Media, media, Mexico, NAFTA, Navistar, New America, North American Free Trade Agreement, offshoring, Peterson Institute for International Economics, Reuters, tariffs, think tanks, Trade, trucks, Trump, Washington Post, Woodrow Wilson Center

Although Donald Trump’s presidency might still turn out to be a watershed for U.S. trade policy, it already seems clear that trade policy coverage from the Mainstream Media will remain uniformly terrible, and unmistakably slanted toward the conventional approach that candidate Trump promised to disrupt. As recent articles from Reuters and the Washington Post remind, the bias takes both subtle and non-subtle forms.

Both pieces deal with the talks to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which have resumed in Washington, D.C. this week. Despite its failings, Reuters correspondent Sharay Angulo’s article on the talks’ possible impact on multinational truck manufacturers contained some important information. For instance, she reported that 98 percent of the trucks exported from Mexico are sent to the United States and Canada – which oddly precedes a claim that most of these truck companies “have a similar strategy of building in Mexico to export to countries other than the United States.”

We also learn from her that more than half the “original parts” of U.S. firm Navistar’s Mexico-made trucks come from the United States and Canada (although this information comes from Navistar itself, and like other company-specific information re NAFTA, offshoring, and trade in general, so far can’t be independently verified). In addition, the article (again citing Navistar statistics) states that the firm exports fewer than half its Mexico-made vehicles to the United States – which seems to differentiate it sharply from its competitors.

Where the report veers sharply from the rational is in its unquestioning acceptance of the claim that “Higher tariffs on imports or reduced trade flows would raise the cost of production and of exporting to the United States. That would make trucks more expensive for all Navistar’s customers….”

What’s somehow missed by the author (and all the “experts” consulted by Reuters who allegedly agreed with this contention) is that this result would unfold only if Mexico retaliated against any Trump administration tariffs on its exports to the United States with new levies of its own that would hit manufacturers like Navistar. Given Mexico’s heavy dependence on parts imports to support its export-oriented truck and other industrial production, why on earth would its government take this step? Such retaliation would “raise [its] costs of production and of exporting to the United States” yet higher. Talk about cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face.

Also missed by Angulo – how higher Mexico production costs could well achieve Mr. Trump’s revamp objectives by shifting truck manufacturing back to the United States. She’s correct in suggesting that low tariffs on Mexico exports to the United States may not suffice. But a logical (and seemingly obvious) implication is simply that higher tariffs will be needed.

The less subtle form of bias came in an October 6 Washington Post article previewing the latest NAFTA talks, and although it’s a more common variety, it was especially flagrant. One big problem is the authors’ (and their editors’) decision, with a single exception, to quote only critics of the Trump administration’s efforts.

Thus, readers are presented with the perspective of a Canadian trade lawyer, a former Mexican trade negotiator who now works for a D.C.-based consulting firm with many offshoring companies as clients, a Mexican business lobbyist who officially advises his country’s NAFTA negotiators, a former Canadian official, a former Obama administration economic aide, and four specialists from two Washington, D.C.-based think tanks.

A second big, and related problem – at a time when the intellectual integrity of such think tanks has come under a positively stygian cloud due to the uproar over New America’s firing of several researchers who ran afoul of big donor Google, the Post piece makes absolutely no mention that both of these organizations depend heavily on contributions from both companies and foreign government organizations with vital stakes in maintaining the NAFTA status quo.

For example, the latest info from the Mexico Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center (itself a recipient of U.S. taxpayer funding), base for one of the specialists showcased in the piece, reveal that the organization receives contributions from no less than six big Mexican companies, plus Wal-Mart (a big importing business) and the main trade association of the American pharmaceutical industry – which manufactures in Mexico for export to the United States.

The Canada Institute, where the other quoted Wilson Center specialist is based, lists the Canadian government as a donor.

As for the other think tank relied on by the Post for (supposedly objective) expertise, the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE), among its U.S. and foreign multinational funders that produce in Mexico for export to the United States are Toyota, GE, Caterpillar, IBM, Ford, GM, Samsung, John Deere, Procter & Gamble, and Mitsubishi.

PIIE also takes contributions from three foreign government entities that help their countries’ companies engage in export-oriented operations in Mexico: the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy, the Korea Development Institute, and the Japan Bank for International Cooperation.

In addition, in recent years, the Peterson Institute has also cashed big checks from Mexican building materials giant Cemex, and from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce – the organizational spearhead of America’s corporate offshoring lobby.

As I’ve repeatedly emphasized, the point here is neither that these think tanks’ findings and opinions lack merit, or they or their donors have no right to weigh in on important trade and other policy debates. It’s that these ostensible research groups should make clear who’s paying their rent – and that if they continue with what I’ve called deceitful idea laundering on behalf of their sponsors, the press should call them out.

The Mainstream Media, however, keeps failing to fulfill this responsibility – which can only deepen already profound suspicions that it’s abandoning its watchdog role and turning into an establishment lapdog instead.