The manufacturing delusion?
From an excellent feature article from The Economist:
It is far from clear such [manufacturing] jobs can be brought back—no matter how much governments spend. For a start, the manufacturing wage premium has fallen sharply. Production workers’ wages in America now lag behind those of similar service-sector workers by 5%. Moreover, the sort of high-tech factories that America and Europe are attempting to attract are highly automated, meaning they are no longer a significant source of employment for people with few qualifications…
According to the IMF, the gap between manufacturing and services productivity growth has shrunk in many countries since the turn of the millennium. In China and India its direction has flipped, with services productivity rising faster. Moreover, services are a broad church, ranging from teaching to tech. The latter boasts extremely fast productivity growth, which may soon be propelled further by artificial intelligence.
Recommended.