Making Stuff: Not That Much Fun

As this Matt Yglesias post points out, the share of American jobs that are counted as "manufacturing" jobs has been shrinking, pretty much steadily, for decades. Six decades, give or take. Now, during the Obama Administration, it's basically flat-lining, which people are hailing as a manufacturing renaissance when of course it is no such thing. Basically, just before WWII around 31% of all jobs were manufacturing ones, at the height of the war that number had jumped to nearly 39%, it fell back to maybe 32% after the war, and then it just kept going down, and now we're at 9% and stabilized. I don't have a whole lot to say about this 'cause I'm not mostly an economist, but one thought I do have about it is that this is the story of progress. The actual work of making stuff in a modern industrialized economy is pretty lousy. You're basically a factory worker, which doesn't even have as much spiritual satisfaction from beholding the product of your labor as an actual tradesman of the late-Medieval or early modern period. Now, many manufacturing jobs are good jobs, because we've developed a social convention that because manufacturing is such lousy work you should be well-compensated for it, a convention that of course was the doing mostly of unions fighting for it. In fact, actually, I think you could take the relative success of unionization in manufacturing trades as evidence that the work is terrible, because terrible work creates pissed-off workers, who decide to fight back. But there's no reason why other jobs have to be particularly worse as employment than manufacturing jobs, and I think most jobs in the "service" sector of the economy basically just involve much more pleasant work than manufacturing ones do. Maybe I'm being a bit naive about how soul-crushing a lot of office jobs or retail jobs are, who knows, but there's certainly a lot less around your work-place that can kill you. So on the production side of things, moving away from manufacturing is a sign of progress: we're doing less unpleasant work. If that means that the average terms of employment have gotten worse, that's only because we've let them, and we could as a society decide to change that.

It's also progress when you think about the consumption side. I don't think the demand for physical stuff in society is limitless. People basically kind of just need a certain amount of physical stuff to enable them to do the things they want to do. Therefore, it makes all kinds of sense that as a society gets richer and more prosperous and as its productive capacity increases, there will not be a correspondingly large increase in the amount of physical stuff it requires. Certainly from an environmental perspective we should hope that there wouldn't be. This allows, or almost sort of forces, that increasingly prosperous society to devote less and less of its efforts to the manufacture of physical stuff. Or, to put it another way, manufactured goods are emphatically not something on which a thriving society will naturally spend its increase in wealth. Things like better education, better health care, a better array of restaurants and foodstuffs, more entertainment, etc., and also more leisure i.e. time spent not working on anything, definitely are the things that increasingly rich societies will divert more and more attention to, so it is completely natural that we should see manufacturing jobs become a much more marginal part of the economy. After all, the exact same thing happened to agriculture, and we've managed to live with the consequences of lots of awesome food and we don't all have to be farmers. There's no reason to fear the consequence of lots of awesome stuff and we don't all have to be factory workers, either.