Ben Casselman

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In this nativist political season, Donald Trump has promised he’d use taxes to force American companies to not relocate factories overseas, but many of them are glad to stay and others are happily returning. The jobs aren’t coming back, mind you, just the factories. The work is being outsourced beyond our species, with machines taking over most of the tasks. That trend will only continue apace, regardless of where the physical plants are located. That’s the real political issue, the increase in automation, and one that’s been almost completely ignored on the trail. That’s probably because there are no easy answers.

From “Manufacturing Is Never Coming Back,” by Ben Casselman at Five Thirty Eight:

A plea to presidential candidates: Stop talking about bringing manufacturing jobs back from China. In fact, talk a lot less about manufacturing, period.

It’s understandable that voters are angry about trade. The U.S. has lost more than 4.5 million manufacturing jobs since NAFTA took effect in 1994. And as Eduardo Porter wrote this week, there’s mounting evidence that U.S. trade policy, particularly with China, has caused lasting harm to many American workers. But rather than play to that anger, candidates ought to be talking about ways to ensure that the service sector can fill manufacturing’s former role as a provider of dependable, decent-paying jobs.

Here’s the problem: Whether or not those manufacturing jobs could have been saved, they aren’t coming back, at least not most of them. How do we know? Because in recent years, factories have been coming back, but the jobs haven’t. Because of rising wages in China, the need for shorter supply chains and other factors, a small but growing group of companies are shifting production back to the U.S. But the factories they build here are heavily automated, employing a small fraction of the workers they would have a generation ago.•

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One of the better understandings I’ve read of the current American mindset is Ben Casselman’s Five Thirty Eight piece “The Economy Is Better — Why Don’t Voters Believe It?” The reporter travels to Davenport, Iowa, to get a sense of why voters in a city with a mercifully low unemployment rate still have a profound fear of falling. 

The passage below is poignant and a little heartbreaking. Local citizens (and others, no doubt, across America) yearn for a return to the time when you were educated when you were young and then coasted to success for the rest of your life on that foundation. Not only is that not coming back, but it’s going further and further away. We’re just at the beginning of a very bumpy technological and cultural transition.

An excerpt:

I was in Davenport just days before a closely contested local election in which the city’s mayor was unseated after eight years in office. The campaign was focused on local issues — a riverfront development project, a new on-shore casino, the controversial firing of the city manager — but Jason Gordon, a city alderman running for re-election, said he had heard voters talk about how the economy had changed.

Gordon, who was re-elected, got his start in politics working for U.S. Rep. Jim Leach, a moderate Republican, and is drawn to mainstream presidential candidates, not the insurgents. (Local government races in Davenport are nonpartisan.) But he said he understood voters’ concern about the long-term direction of the economy.

“This is a county that 40 years ago, you could go to college and you’d be set for life, or you could come out of high school and get a job at Deere or Case or wherever and also be set for life with a solid, middle-class lifestyle,” he said. “That doesn’t exist here anymore, and I don’t think it exists anywhere anymore.”

The recession may not have hit Davenport hard, Gordon added, but it nonetheless revealed how fragile the economy can be, shattering what was left of the illusion of stability.

“If you look at a lot of the numbers, unemployment and other data, they look good, but I still sense some angst that you’re one development away from a dire set of circumstances,” Gordon said. “It’s not your house that burned down, but your neighbor’s did.”•

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