Dear Doug,
Towards the end of your Daily Mole interview, listing the underlying problems of the US economy, you mentioned that it "has no manufacturing sector to speak of anymore".
Just a few days ago, possibly on this list? (sorry, I'm on a lot of lists, and I can't recall where I saw it . . .) I was surprised to read someone saying that manufacturing hasn't in fact declined at all as a sector of the overall US economy. The point was that, yes, a lot of jobs have melted away, been offshored, etc. but - presumably due to enormous productivity increases - just as much is being manufactured in the US as ever, only with a lot fewer workers. Or so I understood it.
This observation runs counter to your point, which is something one hears fairly frequently and which I have generally assumed was indeed the case. Of course it depends on how the manufacturing sector is defined, how output is defined etc., but is there some widely accepted set of statistics out there that nails this meme down one way or another?
Thanks,
John B