This is John Batchel, a conversation with colleague Veronique de Rie of the Mercatus Center

about manufacturing jobs in America, the focus of Liberation Day and the remarks by the Trump

administration.

Veronique is very clear that job loss in manufacturing is not the result of overseas competition.

It's the result of automation.

Here, she explains, Erniek de Rijigieg on where the manufacturing jobs went

and where they're going to go in future.

Well, that's very much the focus of the administration.

But manufacturing jobs started declining since after

second world war and uh and it they declined and pretty much in the same way it's the same story

repeated that happened to agriculture where 95% of the economy was agriculture and now um like 2% or even less than this it may actually be 1%.

And it's just basically, this is a sector that have become more and more and more productive.

And productivity comes from more automation.

And more automation means fewer people.

And it allows you to produce with with much less and two at the very at least two-third of the loss in in jobs that we've seen since the peak

that we've had it's due to automation and the reality is is like today, you know, manufacturing is about 10% of the economy, maybe a little bit less.

And employment in manufacturing is a little bit less than this.

And making production, most of what we import are input that are used by U.S. firm to produce things.

So basically by putting tariffs, we're effectively making it harder for American firm to produce at low cost, and that is going to accelerate automation.