IN THE early postwar decades, the American economy grew at a healthy clip, and the growth was broad-based. While college enrolment was increasing rapidly, millions of Americans, including many without a college education, earned a middle class wage by working in manufacturing. In recent decades, rising inequality and the stagnation of middle class earnings have generated a wave of nostalgia for the postwar economy, and for manufacturing employment in particular. If only America hadn't lost its manufacturing edge, thanks to strong dollar policies and China's aggressive export subsidies (so the thinking goes), all would be well.

The problem with this is that American manufacturing output has grown steadily (aside from cyclical ups and downs) for the past half century. America remains the world's largest manufacturer, though China, with four times as many people, will eventually take over the top spot. There is no reason to mourn manufacturing. Manufacturing employment is a different story. Paul Kedrosky passes along this image:

That's manufacturing employment as a share of total employment. The downward trend is over 50 years old. It predates the end of Bretton Woods. It predates the union-crushing, deregulating era of the late 1970s and early 1980s. It predates the era of Japanese dominance, the rise of the Asian tigers, and the recent surge in Chinese growth. And what it is driving this trend, overwhelmingly, is technology. Manufacturers have steadily improved manufacturing productivity, routinising and then automating occupations.

A plunging dollar, a "get tough" approach to China, and an embrace of industrial policy won't reverse this trend. Eventually China will face the same dynamic and the same decline in manufacturing employment. Time to accept that reality and figure out how best to prepare workers for the good jobs to come.