Debunking The Myth Of America's Deindustrialization

Bill Steigerwald of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review interviews “city guru Joel Kotkin“:

Hail the working man. Another Labor Day is upon us/has come and gone. But are we still celebrating a blue-collar, industrial work force that barely exists anymore? Lots of people think so, but not city guru Joel Kotkin. As he wrote earlier this month in The Wall Street Journal, the death of manufacturing in America is a myth. In fact, in parts of the South, the Great Plains and Pacific Northwest, high-skilled workers are fueling vibrant local economies and helping America make $1.6 trillion worth of industrial stuff — 42 percent more than in 1982. I talked to Kotkin (joelkotkin.com) Aug. 29 by phone from his home in the Los Angeles area.

Many of the points that Kotkin makes will be somewhat old news to our regular readers (not the least of which is this), but it’s great hearing them confirmed and summarized by a self-professed “Pat Brown-Harry Truman Democrat”, who sounds like he’s having enormous difficulty coming to grips with the fact that that version of the Democratic Party is very much in the past.