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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, @04:23PM
Any positive number of jobs is a positive number of jobs. Nobody's looking for early 1900s numbers, just positive ones.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @04:36PM
One additional worker getting a job already is a positive number. If that's all you need to be satisfied, I guess that's possible to achieve.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 21 2016, @06:25PM
Needless to say they're hoping for more than one.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday November 21 2016, @04:37PM
Yep, and you're barely going to get enough to notice. At a likely cost of trade wars that may end up making your inflation-adjusted standard of living go down. Neoliberalism is indeed a shitty political philosophy, but the underlying economics of free trade are reality-based.
And the rest of us will be left with the decidedly xenophobic authoritarian regime you traded for it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 21 2016, @05:11PM
If there is a populist loose on America, then nonsense like SJW-style identity politics while ignoring basic economics of a vast segment of population put him there! If you care more about who uses which restroom than you do whether a great sector of the population has something to put on the dinner table tonight, then you do not get to lecture about economics ever.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday November 21 2016, @05:21PM
Bullshit. The median income of trump voters was higher than the median income of Hillary voters, according to exit polls. You wanted a xenophobic idiot because you're xenophobic idiots, not because your economic needs were ignored.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 21 2016, @06:24PM
That'll be enough of that, you two. This was an intelligent discussion up until now.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday November 21 2016, @07:13PM
Oh fuck off. Defending stupid pieces of shit with dishonesty doesn't deserve respect. The GGP lied. You want to ignore that lie, so you did and focused on my tone. Well boo hoo.
Letting lies and bullshit are exactly why Trump got elected, as much as you love to complain about how people telling the truth in a way that hurts your feelings are.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 21 2016, @09:34PM
Your tone is what got Trump elected. Rest assured, without the "I hate the self-righteous dickweeds on the left" vote, Trump would have lost.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by dry on Tuesday November 22 2016, @02:23AM
From the outside looking in, I'd say that the Democrats running a non-likeable right winger was as much a reason for Trump, who is pretty left, or at least pretends to be, when it comes to the truly left things like decent jobs for the common person.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday November 22 2016, @02:56AM
Honestly, what made Trump win could be called as anything that would have swayed enough votes the other way. Not being assholes would have done it, not running Hillary, even just telling her to stop smirking every time he spoke in the debates might have done it. Not calling half the nation racist, misogynist, homophobic assholes would definitely have cinched it.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 21 2016, @06:35PM
Possibly, possibly not. That the economics of swiftly implemented, unrestricted free trade are decidedly unfavorable to those with a high standard of living is undeniable though. For free trade to work without giving the party with the higher standard of living a fiscal kick in the crotch, the trading economies need to be much, much closer to parity than, for example, the United States and Mexico are. You can either accomplish this rapidly and with much pain by dropping all trade barriers or you can do it slowly and sanely so the economies of the involved nations have time to adjust.
Every President since Clinton chose the former and we've seen quite a lot of pain from it. Hopefully Trump will manage to get us back to somewhere that we're not hemorrhaging jobs but I'm not holding my breath.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by HiThere on Monday November 21 2016, @07:05PM
It's been said the the problem is because capital is free to go where labor is cheap, but labor isn't free to go where living is cheap. I don't know how true that is, but it's certainly a factor. The reluctance to relocate is also a factor within an area of free movement, and I can't evaluate the weighings. But clearly labor has a cost when it moves...possibly selling an old house, buying a new one, and dealing with the bureaucracy. And capital has a cost when relocating, but less so when opening a new factory.
OTOH, automation currently typically de-skills jobs it doesn't eliminate, so you can hire a cheaper labor force. And this is another factor. It looks as if the next step is going to be replacing the low end jobs, but there are some indications that it may also continue cherry-picking the expensive talent. I.e., the people who have trained for years to become skilled in their art, whatever that is. Currently there is work on jobs typically done by paralegals, non-partner lawyers, oncologists, and probably other specialties I haven't heard of as well as work on replacing truck drivers.
Jobs not only aren't coming back, they're going to increasingly disappear. A factory that employs 20 people is not an unreasonable projection for 10 years from now. Every other job from stock boy to CPA is likely to be automated into ephemeralization. (You hire a temp CPA when you need your books audited...the rest of the time the computer does it. You have a single lawyer on retainer to make court appearances, but all the case prep is done by the computer system. etc.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 21 2016, @09:31PM
Interesting theory. I won't be putting my money on it but it's interesting.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.