Matt writes, "In the long run, I think we should expect Americans to continue manufacturing goods. The idea that manufacturing was shedding jobs primarily because of trade with low-wage countries is something of a misunderstanding. There's less cheap labor in Europe than in the USA but there's plenty of manufacturing over there -- rich countries just tend to manufacture higher-end goods." This is true. What's getting hollowed-out is low-end manufacturing, not high-end manufacturing. The problem is that the general sense people have of manufacturing is that it's a doomed, unstable industry that no one would ever want to enter. So the skilled workers that high-end manufacturing needs are running in the opposite direction while the unskilled workers can't find jobs. It's a pretty bad scene, and could mean we lose our low-end manufacturing to China and our high-end manufacturing to Europe. For a longer discussion of this, see my article on the subject, somewhat confusingly titled Inner City Futurism. And if you want to see what high-end manufacturing looks like, take an online tour of Winzeler gears. I visited their plant while reporting the piece, and felt like I'd walked into a building that spacemen from the future had carelessly misplaced.
