People of my age group, born & living mostly in the time when manufacturing was king, have generally had an umbilical cord of attachment to the idea that having an economy of making things efficiently was the answer to all our problems and somehow fundamentally desirable. We were disabused of that notion when they stopped making Holdens and we didn't die; when we started making a fortune as a nation by digging gargantuan amounts of stuff out of the ground and selling it overseas; and when we discovered that China & Japan could make all that stuff we used to make and we could buy it from them for peanuts.
Even the US is waking up to this reality:
"Has the decline in manufacturing been the catastrophe portrayed by various politicians? Hardly. Inflation-adjusted gross domestic product per capita increased from around $15,000 in 1947 to about $66,000 in 2023. Real per capita disposable income rose by a similar rate. So it isn’t true that our prosperity depends on having most people work in the manufacturing sector—quite the opposite. Technology has dramatically raised labor productivity in manufacturing. Automakers here and abroad need far fewer employees now than they did in 2000 to make better cars than they used to. That’s a powerful force reducing employment in the auto sector—and the same is true in many other industries.The wrong answer is to pine for a mythical golden age that never existed. Pittsburgh is now a thriving center of education, research and health services. It didn’t get there by trying to bring back the 1950s."
..."Tariffs have a net negative impact. Yes, they divert business toward protected domestic producers, but they generate losses for consumers and unprotected businesses of a greater magnitude. For instance, recent tariffs on steel and aluminum led to annual production increases worth $2.8 billion for protected firms but led to a larger $3.4 billion annual average in production losses for downstream industries. Elsewhere, estimates have shown that while tariffs can save jobs in protected industries, they do so at very high costs (e.g., about $650,000 per steel job saved). That is crucial information for policymakers to have when deciding whether to impose tariffs.When it comes to tariffs, for example, nearly all the new tariff revenue raised under the Trump administration was used to bail out farmers and ag producers harmed by retaliatory tariffs. We’ve also modeled the estimated effects of Trump’s new tariff and tax proposals and compared the trade-offs of each tax policy change for economic output."
Of course that's the observable truth of history as we've lived it. But what happens when we run out of countries which can profitably make stuff that our houses and garages demand to be cluttered with? Not that it will happen in most of our lifetimes. But there are indications that even China might be coming to that roadblock with the big sign that says Go Back! You Are Going The Wrong Way! The clock of economic reality will keep on ticking over and that most adaptable creature homo sapiens will find a workaround.
