Krugman Blunders on Analysis of U.S. Manufacturing
David Weinberger /
Paul Krugman recently lamented the fact that in recent years, “manufacturing, once America’s greatest strength, seemed to be in terminal decline.” His analysis, though, misses the mark.
He reached this conclusion because “in the 1990s, U.S. manufacturing employment was more or less steady. After 2000, however, it entered a steep decline. The 2001 recession hit industry hard, while the bubble-fueled expansion of the decade’s middle years — an expansion marked by a huge rise in the trade deficit — left manufacturing behind. By December 2007, there were 3.5 million fewer U.S. manufacturing workers than there had been in 2000; millions more jobs disappeared in the slump that followed.”
But while the number of workers in manufacturing has declined over the past few decades, manufacturing production has gone up. In fact, we continue to produce the most in the world.