Comment by chlodwig

I've read the thread and have been very familiar for decades with these debates.

There are two separate questions:

1) Has USA manufacturing increased or declined in its output (measured in things, not $)?

2) If output has declined in terms of things, is this ok because of comparative advantage? Is this ok because the US mains a competitive edge in the highest value most technically advanced products?

As for 1), you say "The net result is that US manufacturing output in real dollars has increased 4x, in the past 70 years." Are you familiar with the term "researcher degrees of freedom"? "manufacturing output in real dollars" is an impossibly complicated statistical construct with infinite researcher degrees of freedom. There are infinite opportunities for "Getting Eulered" https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/10/getting-eulered/ That is why I insist on starting with the most straight-forward numbers -- how many cars? How much steel? And then layering on adjustments on top of that. If steel is down but it is compensated by some other high value product being up, OK, but show me the calculation, show me the work. Otherwise your argument boils down to "Trust the US government's impenetrable statistical calculations, we are getting richer comrade"

As for 2), when I first heard that argument from the most prestigious and credentialed economists twenty-five years ago, my toys and clothes said "Made in China" while advanced technical products like my computer motherboard was made in the USA. Now it's OK that the motherboards are all made abroad and because the most technically sophisticated motherboards are made in the USA. Well, it seems to me like the areas where the USA has comparative advantage in making the most technically advanced products is becoming a smaller and smaller every year. Just this year we are made aware of how much Boeing has lost ground to Airbus. Seems to USA is increasingly reliant on low-tech exports like soybeans, or worse, exporting dollar bills. It seems to me like our trade deficit is gaping wide, which means our real export is living off our status as the global reserve currency. Which feels nice until ones military might is no longer able to support that status (see 16th century Spain). Seems to me that the US is losing ground on military relevant manufacturing -- particularly drones but also steel, ships, etc. And without that, it will not be able to maintain its status as reserve currency in the long run.