Manufacturing Fetishists and the Worrying Class

Great post from Mark Perry at Carpe Diem. He quotes Don Boudreaux. Excerpts:

"The United States alone produces roughly 20% of all the world's manufactured goods. We may not make many toys or cell phones any more, but we do make most of the world's artificial knees and hips, medical scanners and jet aircraft. Those sound like good jobs to me."

Then Perry says:

"We also need to update our outdated views about manufacturing jobs in an Information Age. When many people think of manufacturing jobs, they think of Rust-belt factory jobs in the steel or auto industry that were common in the Machine Age. But when the Information Age started in 1971 with the commercial introduction of the microchip, that all changed. For example, here are some of the largest U.S. manufacturers, based on sales in 2010: Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, Dell, Apple, Intel, Sun, Texas Instruments, and ADM. Manufacturing today has gone high-tech."