No, Trump Can’t Make Manufacturing Great Again

We’re a service economy now — and that’s OK

Weekday posts will be free forever. When I have something not too urgent that I have an itch to publish on a weekend, I may put it behind the paywall. This is an experiment; we’ll see how it works.

This post is about how Donald Trump’s policies couldn’t “make us a manufacturing nation again” even if they succeeded in greatly reducing trade deficits. They won’t, which makes it something of a moot point, but people should understand both that we are going to be a service economy no matter what, and that that’s OK: a fixation on manufacturing as the only source of good jobs is generations out of date.