by DEAN BAKER
I really did not want to waste my time writing about David Brooks just now. When Donald Trump is threatening democracy, the rule of law, and just about everything else that is decent about this country, I hate the idea of wasting time pissing on David Brooks. Unfortunately, I think it is necessary.
Brooks persists in pushing a lie that bears considerable responsibility for getting us Donald Trump. In a piece titled “Can We Please Stop Lying About Obama?,” Brooks tell us that trade was no big deal and we should just get over it. Sorry folks, trade was a big deal and the people who try to tell you otherwise are the liars.
There is a simple story, which is true, that Brooks uses to paper over the harm down by trade. The simple story is that manufacturing has been falling as a share of total employment since the 1970s. It was even falling in countries with large trade surpluses, like Germany and Japan.
The reasons are straightforward. As we get richer, we spend more money on services, like going to restaurants and travel, and proportionately less on goods. In addition, manufacturing tends to have more rapid productivity growth than services, which means we need fewer workers in manufacturing to produce the same amount of output.
That explains why manufacturing has been declining as a share of total employment in the United States and pretty much everywhere else. But that doesn’t explain the pattern we have seen in the United States.
From 1970 to 2000, while there were cyclical ups and downs, manufacturing employment only fell by a bit more than 200,000, or 1.0 percent, over a thirty-year period. From December of 2000 to December of 2009, we lost 5.8 million manufacturing jobs, roughly one-third of total employment in the sector.
That was not just the same pattern we had been seeing over the prior 30 years or the subsequent 15 years. This was a period when the trade deficit exploded, hitting 6.0 percent of GDP in 2005.
The people who try to say either that this massive loss of manufacturing jobs was no big deal, or it had nothing to do with trade, are the liars. And the victims have every right to be angry over such lies.
To be clear, there is no going back, as I and others have written. Donald Trump’s dream of re-industrializing America is absurd on its face. It’s not going to happen, and it would not be a particularly good thing even if it did.
CEPR for more