It’s the productivity, stupid!

When bashing NAFTA for loss of domestic manufacturing jobs one does need to address this:

Index: 1960 = 100

H/T CARPE DIEM

So, Hillary… Barack… how much of this productivity gain should we give up to preserve manufacturing jobs? Think how much more competitive our automakers would be if US plants needed 4 times as many workers as Japanese and Korean factories. They’d probably all vote Democrat, too.

OTOH, we could all consume 4 times as much. As much electricity and jet fuel as Al Gore, for example.

There was a time when 80% of jobs were on the farm. But we got over that.