>I was exaggerating some for radio. The U.S. still has almost 14
>million manufacturing workers (which doesn't count temps who may be
>working in factories - they're classed as service workers). But
>that's way down - it was over 17 million in 2000, and in 1967 too. In
>fact, it stayed around 17 million from the mid-60s until around 2000,
>when it started heading seriously down. Of course, overall employment
>was growing strongly over those decades, so the mfg share was
>declining. Here are the mfg shares of total employment over the years:
>
>1950 30.2%
>1960 28.9%
>1970 25.9%
>1980 21.2%
>1990 16.3%
>2000 13.2%
>2007 10.1%
>
>The last few years are the first ones since WW2 that we've seen
>sustained absolute declines (i.e., not just cyclical ones).
>
>The mfg share of total output is also declining. It was 27-28% of
>total product in the late 1980s; it fell to 25% in 1995, 23% in 2000
>- and under 18% in 2005 (the most recent year available). ICT was 4%
>of the total in 1987 - that rose to over 5% during the tech bubble,
>but it was back to 4%. I remember once telling Andy Kopkind that
>manufacturing wasn't dead in the U.S. - this was probably late 80s/
>early 90s. Andy expressed surprise, and asked if it was titanium
>nipple rings. I don't think we're even making those anymore.
>
>
>
Yeah, but as societies get richer, you'd expect more employment to go to services at the expense of factories, since productivity rises faster in mfg. The best metric to judge the accuracy of the notion that the US doesn't do mfg anymore is the US share of world mfg output or value added. According to the World Bank, it only fell from 24.6% in 1982 to 23.8% in 2004. The EU has experienced a bigger decline. (Sorry, Dennis.) And the US is still #1.
Can't find the original data, but they're reported here: http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/09/05/yourmoney/make.php .
Seth