Guest columnist
Over the years I've often enjoyed Bob Herbert's columns in the New York Times. Even though I seldom agree with his left-liberal stances, I've come to appreciate his intellectual honesty, his appeals to evidence and his expository clarity, the last probably a residual from his 10 years at the New York Daily News.
This said, a piece he wrote late last month on the demise of Detroit is making me rethink things. In this tendentious column, entitled "An American Catastrophe" -- based on Herbert's recent visit to the Motor City -- the columnist offers an extremely one-sided and, even worse, empirically impoverished interpretation of Detroit's economic implosion.
After the obligatory potted account of the city's decay (Detroit "looks at times like a cross between postwar Berlin and the ruin of an ancient civilization") Herbert races through his version of the "popular narrative" regarding the city's troubles, which narrative comprises the 1967 riots and white flight, incompetent and corrupt political leadership, and bumbling by the Big 3.
Herbert's account, quite tellingly, relieves the saintly UAW -- the rent-seeking leadership of which was often as incompetent, corrupt, and bumbling as local pols and auto execs -- of any responsibility for the city's problems.
No matter in any case because, according to Herbert, the "popular narrative," in focusing on local factors, is "too narrow to account for the astonishing decline of this former industrial colossus." Rather, the collapse of the city's auto industry and of Detroit itself were closely related to, indeed, manifestations of economic policies "crafted at the highest national and corporate levels" that "resulted in the implosion of crucially important components of America's manufacturing base."
Simply put, in Herbert's view empty suits in Washington and on Wall Street got bored with manufacturing, and over the past three decades let the sector fade away. According to Herbert's chatty traveling companion Harley Shaiken, a Berkeley labor "expert" who came close to becoming President Obama's Secretary of Labor, Detroit's fundamental problems grow out of the fact that "[w]e've been living with the illusion that manufacturing -- making things -- is so 20th century...and that we could succeed by concentrating, for example, on complex financial instruments while abandoning the industrial base that sustained so many American families."
Herbert picks up on the "abandonment" theme, arguing that "[w]e need a revitalized industrial policy, including the creation of whole new industries, if American families are to prosper in the coming decades." Unfortunately, according to Herbert, there is no "sense of urgency about this in the hearts and minds of our corporate and government leaders," people who just aren't interested in manufacturing any more.
Huh? Who's not interested in manufacturing? Who has abandoned industry? In these regards, things aren't quite as simple as they appear to Herbert and Shaiken.
For starters, one would have hoped that before this column went into print, someone -- maybe a researcher at the Times or even a Berkeley labor specialist -- would have whispered to Herbert that the U.S. in 2009 is still the world's leading manufacturing nation, that our share of global manufacturing output today is about the same as it was two decades ago, and that the total value of U.S. manufacturing output in 2007 -- the most recent year for which data are available -- was at an all-time high. Suits or no suits, the U.S. is hardly deindustrializing.
What is happening is that our manufacturing sector is changing in four major ways. First of all, as our manufacturing sector has become increasingly efficient over time the sector's relative labor requirements have shrunk, meaning that we no longer need nearly so many workers to produce a given amount of output. By the way, that's not necessarily a bad thing, either. Although Herbert in his piece waxes nostalgically (and approvingly) over the fact that Shaiken's grandfather worked on the assembly line at Ford from 1914 "until his retirement in the mid-1950s," I would argue that a bounded career trajectory such as that would today be both wasteful of human capacity and, given globalization and factor-price equalization, a sure route to a sharp decline in an American worker's wages and living standards.
Secondly, as in every other advanced nation, the relative share of the manufacturing sector in America's economy has declined in recent decades as manufacturing capacity and capability have spread around the world, and we have moved increasingly into services.
Thirdly, the structure of American manufacturing has continued to change -- thank God. Just as our manufacturing sector shifted increasingly in the late 19th-century from light industry such as textiles and raw-material processing activities toward heavy industry and fabricating activities, over the past 30 years we've seen the relative rise of increasingly sophisticated manufacturing in aeronautics, space- and defense-related industries, medical equipment, high-end electronics, energy and power (equipment such as gas turbines) and pharmaceuticals and biotech.
We still make plenty of cars and lots of steel in America, of course, though -- change number four -- increasingly in (non-union) auto plants and mini-mills far away, figuratively and often literally, from the UAW, the USW and the like.
Herbert's simplistic Detroit passion play notwithstanding, the U.S. continues to have a vibrant manufacturing sector, by most accounts the most efficient in the world. We hardly need "a revitalized industrial policy" to help Detroit, but rather compassion and a strategy to find ways to get decent jobs of any kind into a troubled city and a troubled region that for their economic woes have themselves largely to blame.
Peter A. Coclanis is director of the Global Research Institute and Albert R. Newsome Distinguished Professor of History at UNC-Chapel Hill.
