James Fallows Quotes

The loss of manufacturing jobs is a sign of economic health.

In the four decades after World War II, manufacturing jobs paid more than other jobs for given skills. But that is much less true today. Increased international competition has forced American manufacturers to reduce costs. As a result, the pay premium for low-skilled workers in manufacturing is smaller than it once was.

Do we want in this nation to lose the backbone of manufacturing in this country? Do we want to be a nation that doesn't want to manufacture anything?

Being a Midwesterner, I know that many of the middle-class manufacturing jobs that had been at the heart of our economy are either gone or going, and they're not coming back.

Unfortunately, we have lost our manufacturing capacity.

As our farms and factories grew more efficient, they accounted for a shrinking share of our economy. And the more productive agriculture and manufacturing became, the fewer people they employed.

Offshoring manufacturing jobs left Americans with fewer high-value-added, well-paid jobs, and the U.S. middle class downsized. Ladders of upward mobility were taken down. Income and wealth distributions worsened.

Manufacturing and other unskilled professions that were union jobs, that allowed people to live a middle-class life, are disappearing both because unions are disappearing and because of the global nature of the economy.

Since 2000, we have lost 2.7 million manufacturing jobs, of which 500,000 jobs were in high-tech industries such as telecommunications and electronics.

You lose manufacturing jobs, you rarely ever get them back again.

Unfair trade deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement eviscerated good-paying manufacturing jobs, putting more than 3 million U.S. workers out of work.

America, the temple of invention and industry, doesn't make things anymore.

Many large corporations in the last 20 years have decided that their business plan is to shut down manufacturing in Dayton and Toledo and move it to Wuhan and Shenzhen. And then they will sell products back into the United States. It’s a betrayal of this country and a betrayal of the middle class.

This is … a time when there is increasingly no such thing as a high-wage, middle-skilled job — the thing that sustained the middle class in the last generation. Now there is only a high-wage, high-skilled job. Every middle-class job today is being pulled up, out or down faster than ever. That is, it either requires more skill or can be done by more people around the world or is being buried — made obsolete — faster than ever

The data on worker displacement after NAFTA reads like a funeral program for the middle class.

Technology has been advancing so fast that the number of jobs globally in manufacturing is declining. There is no way that Trump can bring significant numbers of manufacturing jobs back to the U.S.

Shipping middle-class jobs to China, or hollowing them out with machines, is a win for smart managers and their shareholders. We call the result higher productivity. But, looked at through the lens of middle-class jobs, it is a loss.

By the time I was leaving school, there were no factories. There was no industry.

Trump, who in his own history as a developer preferred mob concrete and Chinese steel to the variety produced in the Rust Belt, cannot bring back the steel and manufacturing jobs lost in Lorain, Ohio or western Pennsylvania.

The bottom line is there are lots of problems that were not created by government. The biggest one is loss of middle class incomes, loss of good-paying jobs which was created by technology and globalization. Above all, when you can move a job to China or India, it reduces wages.

Our great history has been that people came to Michigan because you didn't have to have a college degree to get a good-paying job. Consequently, we have got a larger number of our population that right now are facing outsourcing, et cetera, without higher or advanced degrees.

High-profile industry disruptions such as steel or car plant closures attract much media and political attention.

We have come to the point where a new machine invented in England deprives millions of Chinese workers of their livelihood within a year's time.

You cannot buy an American telephone, TV set or VCR. This is a part of America that has gone abroad and will never come back again.

Human labor is becoming the cheapest of commodities.