A mistake about manufacturing costing Americans millions of jobs
While I very much enjoyed the narrative of plucky Houseman and her cross-tabulation-of-truth battling against elites, smug in their complacent certainty, I’m also skeptical of it.<p>I spent most of this century in the UK, and the narrative there was always that these jobs have gone away, they are not coming back, that’s why things say ‘Made in China’ on them. This seemed to be the conclusion of other EU countries too. Germany was very deliberate in its approach to manufacturing for export.<p>I find it very hard to believe that the US alone could come to a radically different conclusion than the rest of the world about the largest economic trend of recent times, because no-one had examined numbers.<p>The surprising thing is that as a politician you can say what you like, and journalists have neither the ability or interest to examine it before spreading. This seems to be what happened with the automation narrative.