Which Nation Has the Highest Manufacturing Output Per Capita?
Pro-tariff economist Paul Craig Roberts wrote an article on the collapse of Western Civilization. He expects to live to see it. ". . . .the Western world is collapsing so rapidly that I am afraid that I am going to outlive it."
I don't expect to see it. That is because it isn't collapsing.
He included a list of areas of collapse. This caught my eye.
Psychological and emotional collapse is not the only form of collapse underway in the US and Western world generally. There is also economic and social collapse, especially in the United States. Today America’s once great manufacturing and industrial cities, such as Detroit, St. Louis, Cleveland, Flint Michigan, Gary Indiana, have lost 20% of their populations, largely due to the offshoring of US manufacturing.
Here are the facts.
China has 1.3 billion people. The USA has 329 million. The per capita output of the American worker is four times higher than the Chinese worker. China has 17% of its workforce involved in manufacturing. The USA has 10.5%.
How has the USA done over the last generation?
Collapse? From #1 to #2? That is not how I would describe it.
Here is how the Brookings Institution rates the manufacturing environment.
One of the important determinants of how countries perform is their overall manufacturing environment. To assess this, we looked at five dimensions of the overall environment: policies and regulations; tax policy; energy, transportation, and health costs; workforce quality; and infrastructure and innovation (see Appendix for details on measures and information sources).For overall policies, we included indicators on pro-business environment, a risk index, corruption, and open trade policies. With tax policies, we looked at corporate tax rates, use of R&D tax credit and expensing options, and government grants or loans to support manufacturing. On costs, we examined electricity, oil/LNG, and health care costs. Workforce quality included measures on K-12 government spending, higher education spending, family income, labor productivity, and labor support. On infrastructure and innovation, we relied upon infrastructure spending as a percent of GDP, internet access, patent filings, R&D spending as a percent of GDP, and hazard exposure.
Based on these 20 indicators, we developed a 100-point scale to rank countries on their manufacturing environment. Table 5 shows that the top nations included the United Kingdom (a score of 78), Switzerland (78), the United States (77), Japan (74), Canada (74), and the Netherlands (74).
Western Civilization's economic output continues to grow. So does China's and India's. Asia's economy is now Western: Keynesian, but Western. The world is getting richer.
I choose not to use the word collapse. Decentralized, private property-based, profit-seeking systems do not collapse. They grow.
Roberts writes: "Detroit; St. Louis; Cleveland; Flint, Michigan; and Gary, Indiana have lost 20% of their populations, largely due to the offshoring of US manufacturing." No, they shrank in population because they are cities controlled by the Democrats' political machines.
Metal machines are efficient. Political machines aren't. Graduates of inner-city schools also aren't. Metal machines in the Southeast and Texas have replaced workers in northern cities. This report summarizes:
Manufacturing has continued to grow, and the sector itself remains a large, important, and growing sector of the U.S. economy. Employment in manufacturing has stagnated for some time, primarily due to growth in productivity of manufacturing production processes. Three factors have contributed to changes in manufacturing employment in recent years: Productivity, trade, and domestic demand. Overwhelmingly, the largest impact is productivity. Almost 88 percent of job losses in manufacturing in recent years can be attributable to productivity growth, and the long-term changes to manufacturing employment are mostly linked to the productivity of American factories.
When you read "woe, woe, all is lost" jeremiads from supporters of tariffs, check the facts. They don't. You should.