Manufacturing Jobs Are Never Coming Back [View all]

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/06/opinion/trump-tariff-manufacturing-jobs-industrial.html

https://archive.ph/C2ox2

Manufacturing Jobs Are Never Coming Back
June 6, 2025, 5:01 a.m. ET
By Steven Rattner

For more than 60 years, my family owned a small paint factory in Long Island City, Queens, in the shadow of the neon Pepsi-Cola sign just across the East River from Manhattan. That factory and the Pepsi-Cola bottling plant are long gone — two of the hundreds of industrial facilities that once existed throughout the city.

What has replaced some of them are gleaming towers of condominiums, many with seven-figure price tags. Trendy restaurants have supplanted blue-collar diners. In a few decades, New York’s industrial base was extinguished, yet today, the city has never been more populous or more prosperous, a winner in the process that the economist Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction.”

President Trump — who is persisting with his incoherent effort to increase American manufacturing — shows little sign of grasping this key concept. Just as New York prospered as a postindustrial economy, so can the United States flourish without attempting a wholesale rebuilding of lost industrial prowess.

I understand that the relaxation of trade barriers, particularly since China was admitted to the World Trade Organization in 2001, helped accelerate the disappearance of manufacturing jobs. In retrospect, we should have been less lackadaisical about the loss of an estimated one million manufacturing jobs to China in the 2000s. At a minimum, we should have done more to help displaced workers adjust.

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