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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: neolib who wrote (52932)	3/11/2008 12:25:25 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 542251

If anything, I would say that domestic productivity improvements in manufacturing might well have had the opposite effect of what you claim, namely I suspect it has contributed to stemming the loss of even more manufacturing jobs, because it has allowed US manufacturers to remain more competitive. Countries that have a net positive balance of trade in manufactured goods such as Germany and China, have also experienced declines in manufacturing employment. The productivity increase in manufacturing has been occurring for a long time, its massive, and its nearly universal across the world. Its similar in many ways to what happened in farming where we used to take the vast majority of Americans to produce food for the country, now we are a massive exporter and farmers are less than one percent of our population. (Per the BLS, in 2006 the combined total for farmers, ranchers, and agricultural managers was 1.6 million people bls.gov ) Eventually manufacturing employment might reach some similar low percentage in the US, and then later world wide. No sure what you mean. The service sector has grown larger, even with lower productivity growth? Yes, that is true. But that reflects the fact that we don't import services like we import manufactured goods. We do import some services, and the amount imported is growing. The idea that services have grown faster in the US because less of them are imported is to say the least a very questionable assertion. There has been growing demand for services, and growing ability to provide them since fewer and fewer people are needed to produce manufactured goods. The more salient point however, is to ask what the productivity of your average teacher has done over the decades. That is an example of one area where productivity has lagged greatly. I'd argue that Police, Fireman, etc are in the same boat. And it is an increasing problem. Look at the inflation rate in college tuition, and you'll understand the problem. And look at doctors, then look at the increase in medical costs. Your examples, doctors, lawyers etc. are all good candidates as examples of en.wikipedia.org Now to the extent that the fact that we spend more on doctors, teachers, lawyers, police, fireman, bureaucrats, etc., because we produce more in other areas (and are thus wealthier) its less of a problem, but it is still a problem, esp. because many of these areas involve government services, and higher prices here amount to and expansion of government.