Dylan Matthews
Appearances
It's Been a Minute
The fantasy vs. reality of Trump's "smokestack nostalgia"
I do want to underline that what a manufacturing job looks like now looks very different from what it did in the 50s.
It's Been a Minute
The fantasy vs. reality of Trump's "smokestack nostalgia"
The number of sort of assembly line jobs, I always imagine Charlie Chaplin in modern times just like cranking one knob on an assembly line. That isn't really a thing anymore. If you look at the people being hired, these are highly trained engineers with master's and PhDs in electrical engineering jobs. who have to run very complex systems.
It's Been a Minute
The fantasy vs. reality of Trump's "smokestack nostalgia"
If part of the appeal of manufacturing was that it provided decent wage jobs for people straight out of high school, that is not the way a lot of these factories operate these days. And I think it also gets at some of the, like, how we define the limits of what manufacturing is. NVIDIA, which is one of the most valuable companies in the world, does not make a single chip.
It's Been a Minute
The fantasy vs. reality of Trump's "smokestack nostalgia"
They design chips, and they pay other people to make them. And the people doing that design, I think, are in some important sense doing manufacturing.
It's Been a Minute
The fantasy vs. reality of Trump's "smokestack nostalgia"
So I think the I don't want to say that manufacturing is never coming back. Manufacturing will always be an important part of the economy. It's just incredibly, incredibly automated. We've had in many sectors robust growth in productivity, I think, especially computers and computer manufacturing.
It's Been a Minute
The fantasy vs. reality of Trump's "smokestack nostalgia"
And growth and productivity for manufacturing has been the main driver of employment loss in the sector. Competition from China played a role. Some policies taken by the US played a role. The main factor was you need fewer workers to make the same amount of stuff. That process has been going on globally.
It's Been a Minute
The fantasy vs. reality of Trump's "smokestack nostalgia"
And I think there are a few metrics by which global manufacturing employment, the total number of people in the world who work in manufacturing has peaked. If global manufacturing employment has peaked, That is not about policy. That is not about trade imbalances. That more or less has to be because of technological changes.
It's Been a Minute
The fantasy vs. reality of Trump's "smokestack nostalgia"
So that's why I felt confident saying the share of manufacturing employment in the U.S. is not going to go up again. There's just been a lot of money invested in making humans less essential to the production process.
It's Been a Minute
The fantasy vs. reality of Trump's "smokestack nostalgia"
Just two things here. I think the best analogy I've heard for using tariffs to try to get manufacturing jobs back is if you run someone over with your car and then to fix the situation, you back over them again. It just doesn't follow that if the U.S. changing its trade policy one way led to this exit of jobs, that reversing that will bring them back. You can't put the
It's Been a Minute
The fantasy vs. reality of Trump's "smokestack nostalgia"
I think just on the cultural side, I would love for politicians to stand up and say, Amazon warehouse workers need to make more money. I want to make that a job that is good the same way that working at a GM line was a good job. I don't think there's anything magical about manufacturing that means those are good jobs and these aren't. We can make the jobs good if we want them to be good.
It's Been a Minute
The fantasy vs. reality of Trump's "smokestack nostalgia"
I always imagine Charlie Chaplin in modern times just like cranking one knob on assembly line. That isn't really a thing anymore.
It's Been a Minute
The fantasy vs. reality of Trump's "smokestack nostalgia"
I just wanted to underline what Jeffrey was saying about southern competition, that I think so much of the narrative here is about competition from Mexico, from Japan and Korea when it comes to cars. And that's real. That played a role. But the U.S.
It's Been a Minute
The fantasy vs. reality of Trump's "smokestack nostalgia"
federal system and the fact that you had all these right-to-work states, that was undermining the union wage premium and putting pressure on these firms well before NAFTA came.
It's Been a Minute
The fantasy vs. reality of Trump's "smokestack nostalgia"
Yeah. So it all matters, but it's a story of the U.S. internally as well as about us and other countries.
It's Been a Minute
The fantasy vs. reality of Trump's "smokestack nostalgia"
I very much have an email job now. I almost always am on Zoom with sources or phone calls or things.
It's Been a Minute
The fantasy vs. reality of Trump's "smokestack nostalgia"
I do have articles. But if you really think about what am I doing, it's, well, I'm trying to create page views so that we can sell money to advertisers so they can sell cars. The whole economic process I am a part of is so baroque and so apart from what it is I'm actually doing day to day that – you lose that kind of connection. And I think that's an important emotional thing for some people.
It's Been a Minute
The fantasy vs. reality of Trump's "smokestack nostalgia"
I think some people have some guilt about their jobs sitting behind a computer, making more money than their, say, father made in a factory when it seemed like he was doing much more exhausting physical labor. And there's some of this that speaks to insecurities people might have about sort of knowledge sector labor.
It's Been a Minute
The fantasy vs. reality of Trump's "smokestack nostalgia"
I also think we've touched a bit about some of the conservative mythologies here, that I think the idea of a family wage, that you can make enough money in a factory to pay for the full family, which implicitly means the wife, because they're always talking about straight families, the wife does not have to work. I think the nostalgia that you hear on the left about this is different.
It's Been a Minute
The fantasy vs. reality of Trump's "smokestack nostalgia"
If you look back at 50s and 60s, the heyday of American manufacturing was also the heyday of American unions, right? You had a quarter to a third of Americans covered by a collective bargaining agreement. The UAW was incredibly powerful.
It's Been a Minute
The fantasy vs. reality of Trump's "smokestack nostalgia"
Exactly. The UAW in turn supported a Democratic Party where labor was an incredibly important part of the coalition. Spending programs like Medicare might not have passed without strong union support. And so I think there's nostalgia for that. And I think it's not an accident that the manufacturing era and the union era were
It's Been a Minute
The fantasy vs. reality of Trump's "smokestack nostalgia"
coterminous, if you were wanting to invent a place that is useful to unionize, you would invent a factory. These steel mills have many thousands of workers working in the same place in close proximity, doing similar jobs, getting close to each other, and they're talking a lot. That's a very conducive organizing environment.
It's Been a Minute
The fantasy vs. reality of Trump's "smokestack nostalgia"
I also think I give a lot of credit to the legacy of World War II, that America's role in that war to a large degree was to build the planes and tanks and cars and trucks and munitions that helped our allies in the UK and in the Soviet Union grow. win that war. And we came out of it as the dominant manufacturing power in the world.
It's Been a Minute
The fantasy vs. reality of Trump's "smokestack nostalgia"
And yeah, I think that war is very important for how Americans think of ourselves. And manufacturing is a big part of that.
It's Been a Minute
The fantasy vs. reality of Trump's "smokestack nostalgia"
So I agree with a lot of that. I think if I were to make the national security case for manufacturing as sympathetically as I can, the U.S. has a lot of nuclear weapons, but we've been giving a lot of artillery shells to Ukraine in their battle with Russia. And our ability to produce those has been pretty limited. And we've run through a lot of existing stockpiles.
It's Been a Minute
The fantasy vs. reality of Trump's "smokestack nostalgia"
I think some of that was the military shifted in the aughts and the tens to thinking what we're doing is fighting adversaries like Al Qaeda or ISIS. And so it's not going to be like two armies on a battlefield exchanging artillery fire. But now the Ukraine war is exactly two armies on a battlefield exchanging artillery fire. And our ability to produce things for that is not what it once was.
It's Been a Minute
The fantasy vs. reality of Trump's "smokestack nostalgia"
And I think... The other thing is the rise of drones and not just like big drone in the sky dropping a bomb, but things closer to the drones you could buy at Walmart. Like a surprising amount of the Ukraine war has been both sides using drones like that to do reconnaissance on each other and try to anticipate attacks. And those drones are almost all made in China.
It's Been a Minute
The fantasy vs. reality of Trump's "smokestack nostalgia"
There are people in DC who are very convinced that China is a deep adversary. And if this is an important military technology that they make almost all of, I think within that worldview, it makes sense to be a little worried about this. Now, whether you think China is a big adversary and we should be preparing for war against them, that's a bigger question.
It's Been a Minute
The fantasy vs. reality of Trump's "smokestack nostalgia"
The best analogy I've heard for using tariffs to try to get manufacturing jobs back is if you run someone over with your car and then to fix the situation, you back over them again.