"In the decade after World War II, the United States produced more goods than the rest of the world
combined. Now America’s share of world production is about 20 percent, which, depending on how you count, is about the same as China’s or slightly more.
Most of this change reflects other countries’ rise rather than any American decline. In fact, U.S. manufacturing output is about six times higher than it was in 1950; American workers are nearly 10 times more productive than those in China. Moreover, as any country develops—even factory-dense China, even a champion industrial exporter like Germany or Japan—the share of manufacturing in its economy steadily shrinks, as the service activities that mark a richer society, from health care to education to travel, grow more rapidly.
But there is a trend worth worrying about, which is the disappearance of manufacturing jobs from the workforce. Shortly after World War II, about one-quarter of employed Americans held manufacturing jobs. Now less than one-tenth do. From the perspective of individual businesses, this change is natural and desirable—rising productivity by definition means fewer people making more things. But it is troublesome for society as a whole, since factory jobs have historically buoyed the middle class and given rise to future industries and jobs, virtuous-cycle style.
Manufacturing may become strangely less international.
Despite all this—and despite everything we’ve heard through the decades about companies offshoring their factories in search of ever-cheaper pay—high-value manufacturing may increasingly be within each nation’s ability to control. McKinsey’s report divides manufacturing activities into five categories, including minimum-wage sweatshop work at one end and highly precise and mechanized aerospace or medical-tech production at the other. Of these, McKinsey forecasts, the categories that will grow fastest, and pay best, will largely be those whose producers and customers are located in the same country rather than separated by long ocean-freight journeys or expensive air trips.
*********more at the link**********
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/10/made-in-america-again/379343/?single_page=true
US manufacturing may have increased tremendously since 1950 but productivity has increased by much, much more resulting in far fewer manufacturing employees
The only way to make employment in manufacturing increase is for the rate of increase in manufacturing output to be more than the rate of increase on productivity. That does not seem to be happening in any developed country.
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