So... Do These Numbers Actually Check Out?

[Valles]

robkelk wrote:

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BA, the labor market is oversaturated because we've chosen to outsource most of our manufacturing to other countries, leaving substantially fewer jobs here for people to do. If you want to fix that, you'll have to bring the jobs back - which will raise the prices of the goods that are manufactured, because the minimum wages here are higher than they are in most of Asia (where the goods are currently manufactured).

My understanding is that the US and other 1st World economies do very close to the same amount of manufacturing they always have, even in things like heavy industry or cheap plastic toys, and that the job share in those sectors has been decreasing because the automation of those jobs has improved - hyperbolically, rather than a thousand people on the assembly line, it's a thousand robots and fifty robot-repair technicians and five or ten robot programmers.
Which, yeah, has the same upside as the outsourcing - those thousand assembly-line jobs will never exist again.
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