Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 57 of Norbert Michel’s brilliant 2025 book, Crushing Capitalism: How Populist Policies are Threatening the American Dream [footnotes deleted; links added]:

Several researchers have studied the “China Shock,” a reduction in US manufacturing employment after 2000 that was supposedly caused by increased trade with China. One problem with this story is that, although Chinese imports did increase in 2000, they largely replaced imports from other Pacific Rim countries. As a Congressional Research Service paper points out, Pacific Rim countries, including China, accounted for 47.1 percent of all US manufactured imports in 1990, the same share they had in 2017. All that changed is the share of the 47.1 percent accounted for by Chinese imports – it was just 7.6 percent in 1990, but it was 55.4 percent in 2017.