Why has U.S. manufacturing productivity stagnated for over a decade?

If you want to know the answer to 90% of questions, that answer is 'Follow the Money".

US manufacturing stagnated because US companies offshored their production. Great for the company bosses and their huge bonuses, but .... that led to two main failures: the loss of skilled workers, and the loss of company manufacturing knowledge. NOTE: Company money that gets wasted on huge bonuses is money that is not available to improve the company's future profits.

Take the example of Boeing: The replacing of aviation engineers by accountants means that decisions are made on the basis of cashflows, not on the basis of how to make better planes.

Or take the example of the US space industries: the men who were the skilled workers who knew how to make large and powerful rockets have retired and/or died off. Nobody in the US has the day-to-day working knowledge of those men of the 1960s and 1970s who produced the Apollo systems that put a dozen or so men on the Moon. Today we have men stranded in space because their spacecraft is a piece of garbage, and it's not so long since Americans had to cadge lifts to the ISS from the Russians for more than ten years.

My base case is still that the USD being the reserve currency is the problem. There will persistently by more demand for USD than is justified by the need to purchase American exports, so the currency is artificially high. This makes their exports more expensive than they should be relative to others, which hurts manufacturers.

Having a currency that is too strong for your economy always does this, look at the situation in European nations under the Euro.

> OK but if that’s the case, how come other countries — Germany, Korea, France, etc. — have managed to increase their manufacturing productivity over the past 13 years? One possibility is that they’re just catching up to the U.S. and Japan, which were the leaders in manufacturing productivity back in the early 1990s. I can’t find a great data set comparing absolute levels of manufacturing productivity across countries over time, but I’ll keep looking.

This is what I wanted to see as I was reading through the whole article. Everything was about the change in growth, but I wanted to know, in absolute terms, the ranking of countries in manufacturing productivity.

Now, I don't really think the US has hit some sort of maximum in productivity, and the growth we see in other countries is just laggards catching up to us. But it's something that needs to be examined, too.

The numbers for Total Factor Productivity presented at the end may shed some light on this, but, as the author admits, the numbers presented might not be trustworthy, and, regardless, it would still be useful to see how it breaks down.

Im not sure WHY the author is shocked:

https://www.construction-physics.com/p/no-inventions-no-inno...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMMI

Mismanagement, greed, protectionism... The irony of Toyotas whole process coming from an American and not being embraced by Americans is amusing (Demming).

The natural evolution of business is to grow large, and bloated and then fall apart, or decline. The author's article laments manufacturing and looks at services, but fails to look critically at IBM following that same arc.

It's a good read and some interesting data but nothing new to any one in the know.

What should be interesting is the fact that manufacturing is coming back to the US in the small. You can boot strap a manufacturing business in your garage, and the machine(s) to do it (CNC) are cheaper than the giant pickup you would have in there anyway.

No connection with cheap money after 2008? Or opioid crisis? Or lack of universal healthcare and social security?

Re: lack of US exports - export control laws and ITAR make a variety of high tech goods difficult to export