Manufacturing won't save us.

• Author: Noah, Timothy
• Position: Making It: Why Manufacturing Still Matters - Book review

Making It: Why Manufacturing Still Matters

by Louis Uchitelle

The New Press, 192 pp.

At the gut level, allowing our industrial base to shrink seems incredibly unwise. But it's maddeningly difficult to make an evidence-based case for rescuing it.

Donald Trump was elected president in part because he promised to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States. But is that possible, or even desirable, given that manufacturing wages are falling? Nine out of ten Americans believe that a strong manufacturing base is critical to maintaining a decent standard of living, according to the National Employment Law Project (NELP), an advocacy organization for lower-wage workers. But manufacturing wages aren't even keeping up with inflation. Once well above the national median, manufacturing wages were, in 2013, nearly 8 percent lower than average.

Louis Uchitelle, who spent three decades covering manufacturing for the New York Times, makes the case for a manufacturing renaissance in his new book, Making It: Why Manufacturing Still Matters. But it's a fairly weak case, and that's distressing, because few people know more about this vexing topic, or can write about it more engagingly, than Uchitelle.

Much of Uchitelle's argument rests on the indisputable but not necessarily relevant fact that manufacturing mattered quite a lot during the twentieth century. America's unionized industrial sector played an outsized role in reducing and then stabilizing income inequality from the 1920s through most of the 1970s. The growth in manufacturing drove American prosperity from V-J Day in 1945 until the Arab oil embargo in 1973.

Starting in the 1970s, however, the U.S. economy began to deindustrialize. America's share of global manufacturing fell from about 30 percent in the early '80s to about 19 percent today. Manufacturing employment dropped from nineteen million jobs in 1980 to fewer than seventeen million during the brutal recession of 1982-83. It stabilized at seventeen to eighteen million jobs through the end of the '90s, only to plummet again during the aughts, falling below twelve million--about where it is now.

It seems hardly coincidental that real median income--for all U.S. households, not just manufacturing ones--grew at a pokey pace most years after the 1970s. Only now, nearly a decade into the economic recovery from the Great Recession, is the household median (about $59,000) finally catching up, after inflation, to where it stood when the...