March 04, 2017
The Washington Post must think that U.S. trade policy is really awful. Why else would they continually lie to their readers and claim that the cause of the sharp job loss in manufacturing in recent years was automation?
For fans of data rather than myths, the basic story is that manufacturing has been declining as a share of total employment since 1970. However there was relatively little change in the number of jobs until the trade deficit exploded in the last decade. Here’s the graph.
Manufacturing Employment
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics.
And, there was no great uptick in productivity coinciding with the plunge in employment at the start of the last decade. It would be nice if the Washington Post could discuss trade honestly. This sort of reporting gives fuel to the Donald Trumps of the world.
In this context, it is probably worth once again mentioning that the Washington Post still refuses to correct its pro-NAFTA editorial in which it made the absurd claim that Mexico’s GDP quadrupled from 1987 to 2007. The actual figure was 83 percent, according to the International Monetary Fund.
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