Between 1980 and 2011, the value of goods exported throughout the world increased from just over $2.0 trillion to $18.3 trillion, or just over 7% per year (see chart below). Over this period, falling transportation costs and improved communication tools allowed companies to source raw materials and components anywhere in the world for final assembly, […]
Manufacturing
Globalization in the Crosshairs, Again…
Globalization is once again under fire. In the past, developing nations often complained that the benefits of increased global trade flowed disproportionately to the developed world. Today the shoe is on the other foot. Wide swaths of the American public are reacting favorably to Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders’s proposals to reign in free trade […]
The 2-Minute Thought: The Stories We Tell About Manufacturing
There are all kinds of narratives about manufacturing. The old narrative from pre-financial crisis days was that globalization was taking manufacturing away from developed economies and giving it to emerging markets that had cheap labor. The 2000s were all about the hollowing out of textile mills in the U.S. while China became manufacturer to the […]
Make America Great Again?
What’s all this about “again”? We certainly have our problems but the U.S. is still an incredible engine. As the old saying goes, “In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king.” We are qualified to be the one-eyed man today, having recovered more impressively than almost any other country from the Great […]
