LONG TIME PASSING...
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/01/where-did-all-the-workers-go-60-years-of-economic-change-in-1-graph/252018/
President Obama's State of the Union speech was surprisingly bullish on reviving manufacturing, prompting one very clever person on Twitter to say something along the lines of: "Democrats want the economy of the 1950s, while Republicans just want to live there."
It got me thinking: What did the economy look like in the 1950s? If you could organize all the jobs into buckets and compare the paper-shuffling professional services bucket to the manufacturing bucket, what would they look like around 1950, and how has the picture changed in the last 60 years?
National Journal addressed just this topic in its special report on the rise and fall and rise of manufacturing. The spectacular graphic compares employment by sector in 1947 and 2007 and its most important lesson is a whopper. Manufacturing and agriculture employed one in three workers just after World War II. Today, those sectors employ only one in eight.
.......MORE.....
Update: I should have made this point more clearly: Manufacturing jobs have declined as a share of the economy. But manufacturing hasn't declined as an industry. It's grown. By a lot. Here's total industrial production (manufacturing, utilities, and mining output) indexed to 1945. Output has sextupled.
IT DOESN'T SAY, BUT I THINK THAT'S IN DOLLARS...AND IF THEY AREN'T CONSTANT DOLLARS, GIVEN OUR INFLATION HISTORY, THAT STILL REPRESENTS A DECLINE IN MANUFACTURING...STAY TUNED FOR MORE INVESTIGATIVE RESULTS
IT'S NOT CLEAR IF "GOVERNMENT" INCLUDES THE MILITARY, WHICH SHOULD BE SEPARATE FROM "GOVERNMENT", ANYWAY. ALTHOUGH MERCENARIES COULD BE THROWN IN WITH MILITARY...
AND WHAT ABOUT CRIMINALS...THOSE NOT GAINFULLY EMPLOYED BY CORPORATIONS?
WHAT ABOUT RELATION TO THE GROWING OR SHRINKING WORKFORCE? THIS GRAPH IS TELLING IN WHAT IT DOESN'T TELL.
Edit history
= new reply since forum marked as read