MANUFACTURING JOBS
One of Trump’s campaign promises was that he (and only he) would bring back manufacturing jobs to the U.S. The loss of such jobs has often been considered as an important factor in the decline of the American middle class. This paper investigates the extent to which he has carried out his promise.
The Recent Past
Figure 1 shows the number of manufacturing jobs[1] since 2010.
FIGURE 1
There has indeed been what looks like a steep climb in 2017 and 2018, the first two years of the Trump administration. That rise is particularly notable when compared with 2016 when those jobs slumped. However a closer look reveals that the 2017-18 climb has a slope not much different from 2010, 2011, or 2014.
The other thing to remember is that the scale of Figure 1 is greatly expanded to show the changes. Such an expansion of scale is often used to make some changes look more significant than warranted; always think of what the graph would look like if the vertical axis started at zero.
What is going on here anyway? The graph seems to show that manufacturing jobs have been increasing pretty much throughout the whole nine years. Why should we worry? Much of the confusion can be cleared up by taking a longer view
The Big Picture
Figure 2 gives a better picture of the situation.
FIGURE 2
The increase in manufacturing jobs from 2010 to 2018 that looks so striking in Figure 1 now is barely noticeable on a scale that includes zero and extends far enough to see all private sector jobs[2] (many of which didn’t even exist in 1950). In fact, the rise shown in Figure 1 has not even brought us back to the level of manufacturing jobs that existed before The Great Bush Recession of 2008 and 2009, marked by the drop in all jobs those two years.
Over this long term, manufacturing job numbers have moved hardly at all. In 1950 the number of manufacturing jobs was a little over 14 million, while in 2018 the number was a little under 13 million. The peak came in 1979 at 19.5 million. Why we should worry is because the U.S. population[3] has increased by a factor of 2.14X and the number of private sector jobs has increased by an even larger factor. The fraction of jobs in the manufacturing sector has dropped accordingly as shown in Figure 3.
FIGURE 3
All annual numbers in Figures 2 and 3 use the numbers for July of the year as typical of the whole year. Perhaps a more rigorous method would be to average all the monthly values for each year, but that would require a great deal more tedious work over 69 years. I checked the two different methods for 2010 – 2018 and found that there was less than ½ % difference in all of those 9 years (largest discrepancy was 0.39% in 2010), so I feel justified in taking the lazy route.
Conclusions
The number of manufacturing jobs as a fraction of all private sector jobs has remained right around 10% since 2013, so by this measure manufacturing jobs have not increased at all in either the Obama or Trump presidencies. Even from the raw numbers of Figure 1, the increase in manufacturing jobs during Trump’s 2 years in office (468 thousand) is well below the standard deviation (2.1 million) of that variable over the 69 year period of Figure 2. That means it is essentially down in the noise.
From either point of view, Trump has not brought back manufacturing jobs to the U.S. to any significant degree.
Gary Waldman
March 2019
[1] Bureau of Labor Statistics, www.bls.gov, series report CES3000000001
[2] Ibid, series report CES0500000001
[3] Census Bureau annual population estimates.
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