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Pundits will debate the wellsprings of Donald Trump's election triumph for years. Right now, cultural explanations are in the lead. Multiple researchers and journalists are stressing the role of "racial resentments" and xenophobia as the deepest sources of Trump's appeal. And such explanations cannot be dismissed.
But the decades-long decline of U.S. manufacturing employment and the highly automated nature of the sector's recent revitalization should also be high on the list of explanations. The former is an unmistakable source of the working class rage that helped get Trump elected. The latter is the main reason Trump won't be able to "make America great again" by bringing back production jobs.
The Rust Belt epicenter of the Trump electoral map says a lot about its emotional origins, but so do the facts of employment and productivity in U.S. manufacturing industries. The collapse of labor-intensive commodity manufacturing in recent decades and the expansion in this decade of super-productive advanced manufacturing have left millions of working-class white people feeling abandoned, irrelevant, and angry.
To see this, one has only to look at the stark trend lines of the production data, which show a massive 30-year decline of employment beginning in 1980. That trend led to the liquidation of more than a third of U.S. manufacturing positions. Employment in the sector plunged from 18.9 million jobs to 12.2 million.
[...] In fact, the total inflation-adjusted output of the U.S. manufacturing sector is now higher than it has ever been. That's true even as the sector's employment is growing only slowly, and remains near the lowest it's been. These diverging lines—which reflect the sector's improved productivity—highlight a huge problem with Trump's promises to help workers by reshoring millions of manufacturing jobs. America is already producing a lot. And in any event, the return of more manufacturing won't bring back many jobs because the labor is increasingly being done by robots.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 21 2016, @01:30PM
You haven't been paying attention to the proposed methods to return manu jobs here then. They're talking tarrifs, which absolutely will allow manufacturers to employ people at a good wage. Their other effects on the economy are certainly arguable but that is not.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @02:12PM
So the Republicans are all about tarrifs to protect the union jobs? Isn't that supposed to be "socalism" or something? I need to re-wind the Fox News loop from a couple of years ago to see how we were supposed to feel about that then.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 21 2016, @04:32PM
Nope, it's protectionism. Different thing but they do often get used together. Don't take me as advocating in favor of it though. Today I'm just explaining the thinking behind it. My position on protectionism vs. globalism is a bit more nuanced than either political party's.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday November 21 2016, @08:01PM
The problem with protectionism is that US companies import products made cheap overseas, often by their own subsidiaries.
Protecting against cheap Indian Steel sounds like easy politics. But tariffs against Ford/GM cars made in Ford/GM plants 20 miles south of the border, or Apple/Intel/Microsoft gizmos made in Asia is an attack on US companies' profits, which is unlikely to get much congressional support.
In fact, even that cheap Indian steel is needed to maintain someone's profit margin, so every tariff turns into a political stuggle between the lobbyists of the local makers and the lobbyists of the heavy users.
There's a reason why Republicans typically push for free trade (democrats too, but we're talking about the new guy reversing course).
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 21 2016, @09:46PM
That will almost certainly be a problem for Trump, yes.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.