Summary:
I am becoming increasingly frustrated by all the articles I’m reading about how trade is supposedly decimating jobs in US manufacturing. I went to the FRED data set, and they have manufacturing output (real) going back to the first quarter of 1987. So let’s start there. Their series shows total manufacturing output rising from 69.789 in 1987 to 129.129 in the most recent quarter. That’s an 85% gain. At the same time, manufacturing employment has fallen, from 17.499 million to 12.275 million. This represents a decline from 17.3% of total employment to only 8.5% of total employment. […]
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