In the auto-industry bailout of 2009, the United States loaned around eighty billion dollars to G.M. and Chrysler, saving an estimated one and a half million jobs. Since then, $70.5 billion has been repaid—meaning that, in a back-of-the-envelope sense, the federal government managed to save the auto industry at a cost of just six thousand two hundred dollars per worker. One of the architects of this unusually efficient intervention was an investment banker and union negotiator named Ron Bloom. In 2011, Bloom joined Barack Obama’s newly created Office of Manufacturing Policy. He drafted position papers and helped launch a program linking universities with manufacturers. But he was otherwise marooned in his basement office, powerless to influence more consequential policies on infrastructure, education, trade, and China.

“Maybe because of the auto bailout and the mood it created,” Bloom tells Louis Uchitelle, in “Making It: Why Manufacturing Still Matters” (New Press), “there was a little bit of a boomlet in public concern about the importance of manufacturing.” The boomlet didn’t last. It collided, Bloom explains, with a hidden consensus in the White House: “The argument was that manufacturing is dying anyway; let it go.”

To what degree have Democrats given up on the idea of “saving” American manufacturing? Democratic politicians still wear hardhats and visit factories, but they never promise to make manufacturing “great again.” The Trump Administration, on the other hand, has committed itself to the theory that a resurgent manufacturing sector can solve the crises of working-class Americans. The contrast was especially vivid earlier this month, when Terry Gou, the chairman of the Taiwanese electronics giant Foxconn, appeared at the White House to announce plans to open a ten-billion-dollar liquid-crystal-display factory in Wisconsin. Foxconn, which builds the iPhone and other products, promises to hire three thousand workers by 2020, and says it may eventually employ as many as thirteen thousand; the deal includes a three-billion-dollar incentives package and was negotiated by Jared Kushner, House Speaker Paul Ryan, and Wisconsin’s Governor Scott Walker, among others. Donald Trump took credit for the deal, too: “If I didn’t get elected, he definitely would not be spending ten billion dollars,” he said, of Gou.

Almost unanimously, commentators and politicians on the left have responded to the deal with skepticism bordering on Schadenfreude. They point out that Foxconn has announced similar deals in the past without following through; they argue that, even if the factory is built, its workers may soon be replaced by robots anyway. Most of all, they deride the massive incentives package—the fourth-largest in American history, according to the Times—as “corporate welfare.” The package is, in fact, extraordinarily generous. It includes not just training and infrastructure grants but also direct subsidies. According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “because Wisconsin already waives almost all taxes on manufacturing profits in the state, these incentives represent not a lost opportunity at collecting revenue but an obligation to pay cash.” Payments from the state of Wisconsin to Foxconn may total as much as two hundred million dollars per year. If only three thousand jobs are created, that’s sixty thousand dollars per year per job; if the full thirteen thousand jobs materialize, the figure is still fifteen thousand dollars annually. “Foxconn will essentially be run by a workforce paid by Wisconsin taxpayers, while the profits go to Taiwanese taxpayers at the behest of politicians who cast themselves as champions of the free market,” Judd Legum, the editor of ThinkProgress, has written.

The idea of Wisconsin taxpayers making direct payments to the single largest private employer in China certainly seems odd, and the Wisconsin state legislature is currently debating the extraordinarily high costs of the Foxconn incentives package. Meanwhile, for the rest of us, the deal raises an important question: When do manufacturing subsidies make sense, and how big should they be?

In “Making It,” Uchitelle, a veteran labor reporter for the Times, argues that Americans are in denial about the importance and prevalence of subsidies. Our factories have always been “semipublic institutions” funded, to a surprising degree, by taxpayer dollars. “The false premise that manufacturing is a free-market activity—that subsidies don’t exist or are inconsequential—should finally be put to rest,” Uchitelle writes. “No one anywhere in the world makes steel or autos or shoes or virtually anything else in a factory without subsidies.” Uchitelle thinks we ought to subsidize manufacturing more, and more rationally. We should also recognize that, when we decide not to subsidize manufacturing, we are deciding to kill it.

For decades, most Western economists and business scholars have regarded manufacturing subsidies as an unfortunate, market-distorting fact of mercantile life, to be tolerated rather than embraced. Recently, however, there have been signs of a shift, driven by a new appreciation for manufacturing’s importance to the country as a whole. In their book “Producing Prosperity: Why America Needs a Manufacturing Renaissance,” from 2012, the Harvard Business School professors Gary Pisano and Willy Shih argued that, because so many useful discoveries emerge during the manufacturing process, companies that move factories overseas become less innovative with time. In an article called “It’s Manufacturing’s Turn for Special Treatment,” Pisano asked whether we ought to start boosting manufacturing the same way we boost agriculture, education, health care, and finance—sectors of the economy that are heavily subsidized through tax incentives and, in some cases, direct grants. Other researchers, including Jeff Madrick, of the New School, point to the importance of America’s shrinking “industrial base,” and argue that the strong dollar is itself an “an anti-manufacturing strategy” which benefits the finance industry while reducing exports. If that’s the case, perhaps it ought to be balanced out by subsidies to manufacturers.

Still, most researchers stop short of suggesting direct payments to factory owners, analogous to the ones farmers receive. Instead, they propose investment in related sectors of the economy, such as education. Both Democrats and Republicans would rather invest in the system as a whole—funding job-training programs, for example, or research into “advanced manufacturing”—than be seen as “picking winners” or “propping up” individual businesses.

In “Making It,” Uchitelle, the eighty-five-year-old son of a Manhattan textile broker, argues that this hands-off attitude reflects a broad misunderstanding of the history and nature of manufacturing. (Uchitelle spent his childhood visiting the factories of New York’s garment district and sometimes writes about the history of manufacturing in the first person.) For much of the twentieth century, he shows, a great deal of American manufacturing, including automobile manufacturing, happened in cities and was heavily subsidized by municipal governments. Well into the middle of the last century, cities gave manufacturers large tax breaks and grants. They loaned or deeded land to companies for the construction of their factories; expanded sewer, power, and rail service; and widened streets so that trucks could get in and out. In the postwar years, some of the decline in urban manufacturing was inevitable—automobile manufacturers, for example, needed more space. But many companies left because municipal governments grew less willing to subsidize them. “The city of St. Louis wasn’t interested in helping us,” the owner of a heating-unit manufacturer, which left town in the nineteen-fifties, tells Uchitelle.

The decline of American manufacturing is often described as the inevitable result of global economic forces, such as cheap labor. Uchitelle doesn’t deny the power of those forces but insists that the decline had a social dimension, too. After the Second World War, more Americans started going to college, and workers with only high-school educations “came to be seen as underachievers” capable only of “unskilled labor.” Uchitelle objects to this “shamelessly exclusionary definition of skill,” which, in his view, implies that college students with degrees in marketing are more “skilled” than factory workers capable of operating and repairing heavy machinery. This perception encouraged voters to overlook the “variety and complexity” of factory work; as a result, “manufacturers encountered less and less censure” when they closed factories and moved good jobs overseas.