>>1675462The US has no conception of industrial policy other than as glorified welfare, and consequently the recipients of that welfare are not globally competitive. US automakers, for example, were not undercut by unskilled labour slaving away in German, Japanese, or Italian sweatshops, they were beaten by being unable to have competitive products and production processes. Even their partial rebound was limited in fundamentally improving competitiveness; when GM went bankrupt it was the #1 car manufacturer by sales volume. In the case of steel, analysts were warning in the 1960s that US manufacturers weren't investing in next generation technologies, and would face business difficulties as a result.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1880688?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contentsIf you look at the data, US imports as a share of GDP are not especially high; exports are what's lagging. Other advanced countries are highly competitive in the export market. South Korea, Japan, Germany, Switzerland all have a trade surplus with China.
But US has an unhelpful obsession with jobs, which strongly distorts its evaluation of what actually happened.
The US is largely incapable of admitting that the problem was largely internal to the US manufacturing system, and not the mere result of "Benedict Arnold CEOs" or globalists.
