We constantly hear about the “decline of U.S. manufacturing” and how America “doesn’t make anything anymore.” The reality is that the United States produces a lot of manufacturing output. In 2009, America produced more manufacturing output than the combined manufacturing sectors of Germany, Italy, France, Britain, Brazil, and South Korea. And one of the reasons that America has been the world’s leading manufacturing nation for more than 100 years is the continually increasing productivity of our manufacturing workers.
The chart above helps to tell the story of rising worker productivity in America’s manufacturing sector based on new GDP-by-industry data released last week by the Bureau of Economic Analysis for 2010. Between 1947 and 1980, real manufacturing output per worker doubled from $35,000 to $70,000, and since 1980 output per worker has more than doubled to almost $150,000 in 2010, a new record high. The ongoing gains in the productivity and efficiency of American manufacturing workers allow the United States to produce ever greater amounts of manufacturing output with fewer workers, and that’s a sign of a thriving and vital industry, not an industry in decline.
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