Here’s a letter to a new correspondent.
Mr. C__:
Thanks for your e-mail
About my criticism of Joe Nocera’s recent defense of protectionism, you accuse me of being “biased and one sided.” You conclude that if I “even just one time glanced down from [my] pampered perch” I would “see that losing manufacturing jobs was devastating for ordinary people. They want those jobs back and that’s what the president is trying to give them.”
I respectfully disagree. Put aside here the internal inconsistencies of Pres. Trump’s trade ‘policy.’. Instead, please consider that nostalgia for the manufacturing jobs of a half-century ago is terribly misguided. Not only did ordinary workers then earn lower real wages than do ordinary workers today, almost no American today would want to do manufacturing work of the sort that you wish to see restored. Those jobs were more disagreeable and dangerous than are jobs today: the rate of work-related fatalities is now about one-fifth what it was in 1975.
The manufacturing jobs of the past weren’t destroyed so much by trade – U.S. manufacturing output today is 178 percent higher than it was in 1975 – as these jobs were destroyed by a combination of labor-saving technology and workers seeking better employment for themselves and, especially, for their children. The New York Times recently interviewed some retirees who worked in South Carolina textile mills in the 1970s and discovered that these people have no fond memories of that experience.
That NYT report rings true to me, for two reasons. First, I lived in South Carolina’s upstate from 1992 through 1997 and saw that region enriched as its old textile-based economy was replaced by more high-tech and service industries.
Second, contrary to your presumption, I’m well aware of what manufacturing work was like in the 1970s. My father, who dropped out school after the 6th grade, worked for most of his life fitting pipes, and later operating cranes, in a shipyard. And my first job was summer employment – in 1975, as it happens – in that same shipyard. While my job was clerical, that summer – and in five subsequent summers working there – I daily got a close-up view of blue-collar manufacturing work in that shipyard. That work was hard, grimy, often monotonous, and dangerous. And I assure you that if I had told my father and mother during, say, my junior year of college that I was quitting school in order to follow in his occupational footsteps, they would have thought me lunatic.
If Trump somehow manages to restore the American economy of the 1970s, his second term in office will be remembered as, by far, the most calamitously failed presidency in U.S. history.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
