> Manufacturing job share has been dwindling in nearly all middle- and high-income countries. By one analysis, China lost more than 30 million of those jobs from 2011 to 2020, more than twice as many as the number of jobs that exist in the entire U.S. manufacturing sector. Yet total employment continued to grow, meaning the relative share of jobs in manufacturing fell even more sharply than the numbers alone would indicate.
> Manufacturing output, meanwhile, has risen, because workers now produce far more per hour using better and more sophisticated equipment. Today a given number of autoworkers can make, according to my calculations, three times as many cars in a year as they could 50 years ago.
> The problem is that consumers do not want three times as many cars. Even as people get richer, they increase their spending on manufactured goods only modestly, preferring instead to spend more on services like travel, health care and dining out. There are only so many cars a family can own, but that’s not the case for expensive vacations or fancy meals. As a result we have fewer people working in auto factories and more people working in luxury resorts and the like.
