Jackart explains that they’ve not so much been “outsourced” as they’ve been compressed, optimized, economized, and made more efficient. Fewer workers are now required to produced more things, and this is unequivocally a good thing:
A small cadre of highly skilled professionals do the jobs with enormous machines once done by vast armies of peasant labourers; which is what’s happening to manufacturing. British industrial production is rising barring recessionary glitches, UK industrial production has kept rising for most of the last 100 years. We are still producing lots of things that can be dropped on a foot. It’s just it’s no longer done by the descendants of those peasants who left the land during the industrial revolution to seek work in factories. Those factories still exist, but they employ a small number of highly paid people to operate machines which do the riveting, welding, assembling and polishing. Each machine takes does the job of hundreds of people.
That’s what happened in Agriculture, and is happening in Manufacturing. And THIS IS A GOOD THING. Because all those people not employed in riveting in Tyneside shipyards or Scything Lincolnshire corn fields are employed doing something else for someone else. All that productive labour has been freed, but we’re still getting the food produced, in abundance the Lincolnshire harvestman would have thought impossible.
The majority of Western economies are now services. Even the Germans, who’ve a niche in Machine tools and Automobiles have only 21% of their economy in making things they can drop on their feet.
And this reflects another point. Manufactured products are getting cheaper, so to have material wealth unimaginable to our Lincolnshire harvestman requires far fewer hours of Labour to achieve. Thus cars, the most expensive manufactured products most of us buy, are getting cheaper relative to average earnings, decade by decade. A reliable runaround would have been beyond the means of a WW2 factory worker, but is available to a cleaning lady now. So the same car forms a smaller part of the economy. Having spent less on the car, we can spend more on clothes, shoes, music, computers, kitchen appliances etc, and in so doing provide jobs to people supplying those things. Above all we can pay for people do do things for us – cut our hair, serve us food in restaurants, mediate for us legally, invest our surplus production into other productive activities, heal our illnesses and so on.
[. . .]
The next challenge is to banish stress and misery from our lives. I suspect this will be harder. The only caveat is that I have a great deal more faith in Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” (a much maligned and misunderstood idea) than the idiotic ideas of politicians. Politicians still seem to think manufacturing jobs are special, which suggests they don’t understand why we’re rich. The only limitless resource is man’s ingenuity. Markets aren’t an ideology, they’re simply what works in the absence of one, by deploying that one limitless resource to everyone’s benefit.
