… is from Colin Grabow’s excellent October 2023 paper, “The Reality of American ‘Deindustrialization’”:
Although superficially worlds apart, there is little functional difference between manufacturing work being transferred to a worker in another country or to a robot or advanced machine on American soil. Both are properly understood as productivity drivers that lie at the root of prosperity. Through such productivity enhancements, the United States reduces the cost of producing goods and raises its standard of living.
DBx: Indeed so.
Pictured above is a modern example of labor-saving technology. People specialize at producing goods for which they have a comparative advantage and then feed some of those goods into the above-pictured machine. This machine then transforms those goods into other goods for these people to consume – other goods that would have taken these people more time and effort to produce.
