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posted by n1 on Monday November 21 2016, @10:45AM   Printer-friendly
from the post-labor-economics dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by HiThere on Monday November 21 2016, @07:05PM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Monday November 21 2016, @07:05PM (#430751) Journal

    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.)

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  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday November 21 2016, @09:31PM

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Monday November 21 2016, @09:31PM (#430844) Homepage Journal

    Interesting theory. I won't be putting my money on it but it's interesting.

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