Aether,
I’m not a practitioner of the dismal science so I can’t trade stats and charts with you. My evidence is empirical and sensed. Western New York where I was raised is bleak with chained up factories and relatively high unemployment. In
eastern Alabama long standing textile plants went first to Mexico and then Asia. No fear though meth labs have filled the void. The North Carolina furniture industry is nowhere what it was. In my experience in custom woodworking, raw lumber is shipped to China and returned as inferior but cheap wood products.
What smokestack industries gave unskilled Americans was entry into the middle class. Did unions overstep? Sure, but it is driving an increasing wedge between upper and lower classes in America.