A Cafe patron, who requests anonymity, sent to me earlier this afternoon the following e-mail. I share it with his kind permission.
Dr. Boudreaux:
I spent a number of years working as a manufacturing engineer for a rather large US aerospace company in New England.
One building had been deprived of investment dollars for several decades. The equipment was aging and highly manual. An expert machinist would have to set-up, load, and monitor the machine through most of its operation.
In the other building–once known as the “factory of the future,” the machine tools were ~10 years newer–although still old by the time I arrived in 2002. In that building, one machinist would simultaneously operate five or six machines. If you want to know what happened to manufacturing jobs–it’s right there. Drop me into a factory from 1970 with access to machine tools from 1990 and I will send home 4 out of 5 employees without outsourcing a single job to Mexico or China or any other trade-related boogie man.
I’m continually frustrated by folks who have never had metal chips in their shoes opining about the death of American manufacturing. We manufacture more value today with less people. It’s that simple.
