I think government red ink did cause such cutbacks in the 1990′s. Defense spending was reduced after the Cold War ended as part of the overall plan to reduce government deficits.

I believe government red ink – and the interest on government borrowing – will force Congress to make spending cuts in the very near future. Absent some rallying event such as 9/11, I expect defense to absorb a significant portion of those spending cuts.

How much of this employment do free consumers demand, and how much is bleeding edge, borrow and spend, tax and spend or print and spend?

I am not polite to condescending pricks jerking off in their virtual closets. You were incapable of linking to Table 3 (your thesis and the subject matter of this blogpost), other than a cut and paste (minimum wage) job. I linked to Table B-3 and Table 3 in the BLS arsenal of data and you are, thus far, incapable of analyzing same.

Dewey, you are so dense that you inadvertently verified Meyerson’s case with a set of data that he didn’t know even existed. In other words, when the BLS groups by industry, manufacturing is so-so, but it is not the case when the BLS groups by occupation. Sheesh, be quiet, don’t let it out in the mainstream media!

As you were incapable of responsiveness to the question (Why don’t you look up where manufacturing wages rank by the lowest occupational grouping?), I will answer it for you: FOOD PREPARATION.

So be it; don’t worry, if this blogpost is an indicia, I don’t plan to be back here very much, if at all. There ain’t much commentariat knowledge to ingest on this blog.

This is the statement I asked you to explain:

“of the 22 occupational wage categories, manufacturing ranks 3rd.”

Can you show me the data you used to derive this ranking?

I understand that manufacturing managers earn more than finance and insurance managers. But that really doesn’t tell us anything about whether manufacturing employees overall earn more than finance and insurance employees overall, does it? If the manufacturing workforce is composed of primarily production workers, the wages of its managers and its computer programmers are not that relevant. Likewise, if finance and insurance have very few production workers, the wages of that industry’s production workers are also not very relevant. So I guess I do not understand how Table 3 you linked to shows much about the issue of this post: whether the manufacturing sector pays more than service sectors such as finance, transportation, information, and wholesale trade.

The first category in Table 3. Hourly median wage rates by industry and occupational group, May 2008, is management. The median hourly wage of manufacturing managers is $48.41. Of the 19 occupational categories, this cohort ranks 6th. When it comes to the computer and mathematical sciences grouping, manufacturing ranks 1st. Why don’t you look up where manufacturing ranks by the lowest occupational grouping?

You see, Dewey, Meyerson might be an idiot journalist loaded for bear with a bb gun, but you are the town idiot carrying a kalashnikov without the ability to shoot straight. You are full of shite.

“The broadest definition of the service sector encompasses all industries except those in the goods-producing sector—agriculture, mining, construction, and manufacturing. Under this definition, services include transportation, communication, public utilities, wholesale and retail trade, finance, insurance, real estate, other personal and business services, and government.”

The BLS records both occupational and industry wages. The monthly industry wages are posted here and the annual occupation wages are posted here.

If the empirical truth be told, you are positing medianoccupational wages and Meyerson is positing mean industry wages.

It’s not a dead heat.

Of the 14 industry wage categories, manufacturing ranks 9th on a mean hourly basis but 7th on a weekly paycheque basis; of the 22 occupational wage categories, manufacturing ranks 3rd.

If only the truth be told.

In any case, none of what happens in 2009 has any bearing on the argument presented by Meyerson. He claimed that service sector jobs do not pay as well as manufacturing jobs. The evidence says otherwise. Meyerson said nothing about filtering out government influenced jobs.

I could ask you the same question, Martin, about manufacturing jobs. What happens to manufacturing wages when government red ink causes a cutback in defense jobs at Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and United Technologies.

I reported the sectors having employee counts which are of similar scale:

manufacturing ……… 13.6 million
finance/insurance …… 5.9 million
educational services .. 12.7 mmillion
health care/social ….. 16.5 million
government ………….. 9.7 million
transportation ……….. 5.3 million
information …………… 3.0 million
wholesale trade …….. 6.0 million
construction ………… 7.5 million
retail trade ………….. 15.6 million

It is meaningful to compare industry data representing populations of the same scale. The sectors will never be exactly the same size, but all are large enough that medians are meaningful when compared with one another.

On the other hand, the SIC categorization analysis referenced by Seekingexports includes “industries’ as small as Fur Goods (770 workers), Luggage (9,610 workers), and Cigars (3.020 workers). It also includes such service industries as telecommunications (1,108,000 workers), elementary/secondary schools (7,567,490 workers), and hospitals (4,986,550 workers). The “analysis” referenced by Seekingexports counts each one of those industries, whether 700 workers or 7 million workers, as single number. Manufacturing appears to be better-paying only because it has many small “industries” with high wages which are given equal weight as a giant industry such as hospitals. That’s one reason why the analysis is meaningless.

Education services are obviously closely linked to the state sector, and trillion dollar bailouts in a single year indicate how closely the FIRE sector (Finance, Insurance, Real Estate) is now linked to the state.

Meanwhile, the state sector itself is deep in the red and running deficits that boggle the mind by any historical measure. You need some deeply rose colored glasses to filter out all of that red. What happens to those top “service sectors” when the red money pump suddenly stops? What happens to the real value of other wages when it doesn’t?

The BLS data referred to uses the Standard Industrial Classification to separate the manufacturing sector into many more industries than it does finance or information/telecom or any of the other higher paying industries.

Right. Isn’t that what you’ve done above by listing many separate “service sector” categories while listing a single median wage for all of “manufacturing”? I agree that Seekingexports’ finding isn’t very meaningful, but how meaningful is yours?

Harold Meyerson said that retail AND SERVICE sector jobs do not pay as well as manufacturing jobs. He was correct about retail, He was wrong about the service sector.

Gil: “of course the top three out of four or closely related to the government.”

Excuse me? What do you mean by “related to the government”? At the time this survey was completed, “the government” did not control either the information/telecomn sector or the finance/insurance sector.

If you wish to eliminate jobs that are “related to the government”, we would need to also eliminate the large number of defense industry firms in the manufacturing sector. If we removed firms such as Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and United Technologies – and all their highly paid scientists, engineers, and technicians – manufacturing sector wages would be significantly lower.

Why not? Is it because your definitions of innovation, technological advancement, and entreprenuership are very narrow? Consider this: when an education company such as University of Phoenix started using internet capabilities in a new and different way, that was innovative. When banks started to use data mining tools to uncover zip codes and even zip plus 4 codes with the highest potential for profitable credit card promotions, that was innovative.

Meyerson is the one who is touting the supremacy of the manufacturing sector, rather than looking at overall wage distributions. That’s why I responded with sector level data. Meyerson stated that the service and retail sectors “do not pay as well”. The data I provided shows that he is mistaken.

You are correct that many high paying manufacturing jobs have been eliminated over the past few decades. but you are misinterpreting the report to which you linked in stating that “a decade ago manufacturing was on top.”

If you can find identical reports from 1997/1998 and 2008, then prehaps we can resolve the question you raise.