This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, October 30th,

2023. I'm Caleb Brown. Is America

de-industrializing? Not even close. In fact, American

manufacturing could and should be more global, that is, the free flow of workers,

inputs, and ideas is critical for the American powerhouse of production to continue.

Cato's Colin Grayboe touching on his new essay for Cato's defending

globalization project, brings the good news of American manufacturing.

It is a popular claim that manufacturing employment in the US has been in a long, slow, steady

decline since the early 70s.

And this is largely presented as evidence that the United States manufacturing has been hollowed out.

It has been shipped elsewhere and that the United States doesn't build things anymore.

That's right.

So we hear this a lot, I think, in the discourse here in Washington,

there's a lot of talk about the need to re-industrialize,

to bring manufacturing back, which of course implies that it left.

But the reality is that manufacturing hasn't gone anywhere. The United States is a manufacturing

superpower. The United States accounts for a greater share of global manufacturing output than Japan, Germany, South Korea combined.

So why is there this disconnect between the fact that we do in fact make a lot of stuff and there's this perception of American

de-industrialization? I think it goes back to what you mentioned earlier. Employment has declined significantly. It peaked in 1979.

As them pretty much steadily downhill since then, I think it was something like 19.5 million back in the late 70s and now are in the neighborhood of 12, 13 million.

But this is because largely it's a story of productivity.

Americans are incredibly productive.

...