David Hebert, Peter C. Earle
Imagine for a minute that you have the world’s greatest chef working in your restaurant. The food is so incredible that people regularly travel from miles away to dine at your restaurant. Then, a new restaurant opens, and while it sells an impressive quantity of food, everyone is very much aware that its quality is lacking. While your restaurant’s output has remained steady, you decide that you need to protect your restaurant from this new entrant. To do so, you actively make it harder for your chef to buy ingredients, telling them, “if you want ingredients, you’ll have to grow them yourself!”
If this sounds absurd, that’s because it is. Unfortunately, this is exactly what Washington politicians are doing to the manufacturing sector in the United States right now. Why is that? Because of, primarily, China’s supposed manufacturing “dominance.”
It has become standard parlance for members of both parties to wax poetically about the “hollowing out” of the American manufacturing industry. said as much in 2022 as did just this past April. For the most part, these two are referring to jobs in manufacturing, which have certainly declined over the last 50 years. However, some go even further, purporting that “we don’t make anything anymore.” said as much in 2015 while on the campaign trail to his first term in office, echoed this in 2023, and joined this chorus just this past March.
What are the facts?. for 2024 reached a staggering in total value added. The US, by comparison, produced a mere. By all accounts, in raw terms, China is producing about 60% more output than we are.
However, what is often overlooked, despite its widespread acknowledgment in other contexts, is the fact that China has a very large population. And when it comes to manufacturing, the numbers are simply staggering. In 2020, the year of China’s most recent census, over were working in the manufacturing sector. Later, independent reports have the Chinese manufacturing workforce at. This means that the average Chinese manufacturing worker generates between $22,028 and $38,916 in value-added. By comparison, America employs just, which is 6-10.6% of the number of manufacturing workers that China employs. On average, US manufacturing workers generate $229,133, which means our workers are between 6 and 10 times as productive as the average manufacturing worker in China.
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