http://www.aei.org/publication/us-politics-is-badly-infected-with-economic-nostalgia/US politics is badly infected with economic nostalgiaJames Pethokoukis
April 28, 2016
The current state of American politics has led to a rediscovery of working-class philosopher Eric Hoffer. Probably Hoffer’s most well-known work is “The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements,” published in 1951. As a recent Daily Beast story on his new found relevance explains, “Hoffer’s big insight was that the followers of Nazism and Communism were essentially the same sort of true believers, the most zealous acolytes of religious, nationalist, and other mass movements throughout history.”
Hoffer is amazingly quotable — and tweetable for that matter. Here’s one a bit of wisdom that seems particularly applicable at the moment: “All mass movements deprecate the present, and there is no more potent dwarfing of the present than by viewing it as a mere link between a glorious past and a glorious future.”
Preach. I’ve written frequently about the economic nostalgia that has infected American politics — on the left and right — along with the ridiculously gloomy assessment of today. For instance, here is Donald Trump recently: “I think we were a very powerful, very wealthy country. And we’re a poor country now. ”
Of course America remains an incredibly powerful and prosperous and innovative nation, a nation with the strong military and a net worth of nearly $100 trillion. And American living standards are certainly higher today than a generation ago, much less two generations ago.
One weird offshoot of all this is the obsession with manufacturing jobs as a key metric of America’s health. Back to the 1950s and 1960s! In a recent column, New York Times’ reporter Eduardo Porter writes at length about the myth of the manufacturing jobs renaissance:
No matter how high the tariffs Mr. Trump wants to raise to encircle the American economy, he will not be able to produce a manufacturing renaissance at home. Neither would changing tax rules to limit corporate flight from the United States, as Mrs. Clinton proposes. … Look at it this way: Over the course of the 20th century, farm employment in the United States dropped to 2 percent of the work force from 41 percent, even as output soared. Since 1950, manufacturing’s share has shrunk to 8.5 percent of nonfarm jobs, from 24 percent. It still has a ways to go. The shrinking of manufacturing employment is global. In other words, strategies to restore manufacturing jobs in one country will amount to destroying them in another, in a worldwide zero-sum game.
And me:
So when Trump says he wants to force Apple to make its products in America, what he’s really unintentionally saying is that he wants American robots to do the work of Chinese robots. President Trump can raise all the tariff walls he wants — manufacturing jobs lost to Asia aren’t coming back in any sense that Trump means. Going forward, it’s automation, not globalization, that poses the bigger risk to the economic security of the American labor force. And unlike off-shoring, robots and super-smart software will affect both manufacturing and service jobs.
