In this episode, I take on Noah Smith, fake wage growth stats, hedonic inflation tricks, and the collapse of working-class America that polite economists still won’t admit happened.
I too found Bernie a great breath of fresh air, and 60 percent of Dems voted for him in our primary, and as I canvassed a lot of Republicans were convinced, too.
I was a State Delegate for Bernie in Hawaii, twice. What the DNC did to Bernie is the reason we have a fascist authoritarian dictatorship now. Hawaii went for Bernie by 70%. Bernie won every state if you discount superdelegates. And then they swung the next election by pushing the relentless narrative across all liberal media platforms, "Bernie can't win." That was the DNC's strategy, to create fear in the minds of the delegates and voters, and it worked. Bernie would have crushed Trump and paved the way for AOC. Even when God had the song bird land on Bernie's podium, while Trump was being attacked by a bald eagle, wasn't enough. We are so screwed now.
I worked for Bernie also. Then I watched Obama trash Bernie’s primary. If Bernie had been able to run his primary on a level field, he would be our president now.
I live in Keene, NH teaching Econ at State College. I got here 2000 and said, “oh, mf isn’t dead, look at all the jobs.” By 2009 the businesses had changed mgmt or left town. I checked, was shocked to see NH lost 30 percent of its mf jobs between 2001 and 2009! So did US as a whole. NOBODY WAS TALKING ABOUT IT. And then I met an entire family addicted to opioids at my kids’ school, and there was no help for them. Thank you.
And that's the most frustrating thing that I see with the Democratic party is for whatever reason they neither want to admit it or even when they do admit it they want to convince us that it's just gone that there's no way to manufacture in America again but it doesn't seem to be the case like it can be it's a policy choice we have we have to make the decision to do it. But like you see with these Trump tariffs just putting tariffs up does not make companies come back you've got to actually I think help them build and make it competitive.
Hearing we can't manufacture is infuriating. As long as there is Crypto and other bets thatthat political manipulation can make come out right, it's hard to incentivize people with money to invest in physical manufacturing and training of people. Attacking universities while implementing tariffs is the opposite of what we need: business supported universities, high schools, and community colleges precisely when our manufacturing capacity was greatest. My uncle was planning to be a machinist in high school in the 1950s when someone just offered him a scholarship to Notre Dame in engineering because that's what the society needed. P.S. https://www.dollarsandsense.org/rising-asset-bubbles-distort-the-industrial-base/
That's one of the best posts I've read in a long time. I'm a 64 year old lifelong blue collar guy and I've lived what you said. And I totally agree that our lack of manufacturing will be the end of us. I can build or fix most anything, but the shit being built now isn't designed to be fixed, just thrown away. I'm sharing this with my 400+ subscribers immediately.
I would also add the factor of talent distribution. The top 1% of talent is much more productive than the rest, and they have always been crucial to the “success” of a civilization. In the 70s, banking was still mostly boring, and the top students didn’t flock to it unless they came from money. As a result you had higher talent in academia, medicine (notable psychology), manufacturing, government (NASA and others), and other non-financial sectors.
Now the top students go into finance. VC and PE used to be tiny, now they are the only smart destination, and these are extractive, not productive. Top-class consulting is also popular, and increasingly pointed at optimizing arbitrage and extraction/pricing instead of organization or strategy. Finally (and mostly for immigrants) tech, though this is fading fast.
If no talent goes into manufacturing, it dies. Same for retail, academia, materials science, etc.
eah, exactly. There was a time when the top talent coming out of MIT or Stanford wanted to go build something—whether that meant joining NASA, working at the Department of Energy, or getting involved in big national projects or cutting-edge manufacturing.
They wanted to invent, develop, and produce—not just extract.
But like you said, Wall Street and the whole financialization model warped those incentives. Now the smartest folks get funneled into hedge funds, PE, VC, or consulting—industries that don’t build much of anything. Just skim value off the top.
And when top-tier talent disappears from real sectors—manufacturing, infrastructure, public R&D—those sectors wither. No amount of policy talk can fix that without changing where talent flows.
I agree and appreciate your clear and well-documented presentation. This also was and is Marianne Williamson’s message throughout her career, books, and campaign as Democratic candidate for president 2020 and 2024.
I love the analogy of the rotten walls and the criminal in chief. Great communication the whole video and I say that as someone who loathes listening to podcasts.
Thanks for giving my standard rant (from WNC) some articulation, facts and style. Mine is much more a sort of low growl in the general direction of Wall Street.
Right now the Department of the Interior gave control over to DOGE and the selling off of our great public lands has begun. Forty years ago I drove my family out into the wilderness’s vast and amazing sites. Last year, I noticed road closed wires preventing that from happening now. I don’t think it’s too late, but we have to vote to make Congress take control back from the executive branch ASAP.
😩 It's crushing my soul. Vast wilderness, it's now only a facade. Take a look at the truth on Google Earth, humans have taken everything. There's nothing left.
Geee, if we'd only had heard Ross Perot when he talked about the "Giant Sucking Sound".
Richard Wolff has been harping on how the factories in New England moved to the mid-West, then to the South, then to Mexico. Business Schools preach "go where labor is cheap and the demand is high". Business is now in China.
Yet, Americans want to live in the past glory of their fathers and grandfathers. Hide their head in the sand and pretend that the criminal Oligarchy (which in the face of Trump actually has taken on a "mob voice) "really cares".
Even Norman Finkelstein no longer uses the term Zionist.
So let's be trite and repeat "All wars are bankers wars."
Now.... what are we going to do about it?
Putin and Xi, new heroes for the working class.
The AIPAC controlled Congress is the enemy, and by extension: Israel.
Only one third of our mf jobs went to China, per David Autor who is credited with saying the jobs went to China. My guess is financial engineering took the other two-thirds. There is a good novel by John Hacket who was cfo of Cummins engine, it’s self published on Amazon, where he explains how finance guys and lawyers shake value out of firms and dismantle them. I also wrote in Dollars & Sense about Timken’s deccumulation of capital.
Absolutely they've gone all across the world not just to China. We just decided that it wasn't something we wanted to do the rich and the elite made more money destroying our Industries and infrastructure than building it. It's also much easier to sell things that were built over multiple generations and it is to continue building.
We're simply repeating history here - an incompetent POTUS (Hoover) creating unnecessary economic hardship (tariffs and closing the doors on immigrants) during spectacular Wall Street speculation (Great Depression) while robber barons (Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, JP Morgan, etc) focus on transferring wealth from the bottom 90% to their pockets. Sound familiar?
There are some key differences, mainly that we are not already in a material depression, the authoritarians have already seized sizable control of government institutions, the DNC is led by neo-liberals who've historically sided with wealthy individuals and corporations over the contituents they represent, and the billionaire oligarchs today are driven by a desire for feudal technocracy to own countries that they become monarchs of (thanks, in part, to Curtis Yarvin), and leasing the assets of their respective territories back to the people at inflated costs.
FDR was the Bernie of the time. "They [the oligarhcs] are unanimous in their hatred for me, and I welcome their hatred." He pulled the working class out of poverty, reinforced workers' rights and regulations on financial instruments, initiated near 95% taxes on the wealthiest Americans highest earnings, and was in the process of implementing universal healthcare.
I don't know how we win this class war. How do we overcome the struggle of a progressive breaking out of the DNC that has worked so hard to keep progressives in check? How do we unify the message of voters (even progressives) torn by identity politics, and redirect them to focus on one collective aim: to right this economic ship toward the rights and well-being of the working class? Democrats are consistently split on what the message should be (LGBTQ+, civil rights, etc), when the answer should be that all those issues are directly and indirectly caused by a lack of economic justice and fairness.
I am truly skeptical of how we make progress. I will always vote for the progressive voice in the party (today, AOC); however, I want to fundamentally understand what our action plan is to get these people motivated by equality more than money elected.
I wonder about if we are not already in a material depression. You look at the numbers of homeless people in CA, and wow, some people are feeling like they are in an extreme depression. Hard for young families to find housing, they actually face eviction even with jobs. Teachers also feel like its just downhill, and has been for like 15 years. Nurses who work in hospitals are under intense pressure. Maybe our data collectors are not really measuring what a lot of people are experiencing.
I do agree that we need to have more manufacturing here, and more people who have the ability need to go into the building/maintenance trades (plumbers, car mechanics, carpenters, etc.) We still need workers in those fields. New manufacturing, though, will rely more on automation -- when I was in fifth grade, I asked my teacher about this "If robots do the work, what will people do for a living?" and got laughed at.
But all the factory jobs in the past weren't "living wage" either. I worked in two different garment factories in the mid-1970's, after graduating high school, before college in a three-year gap. Supposedly we had a union, but I never heard much from them. The workforce was mostly women, doing piecework. They paid a sub-minimum "training wage" for an indefinite time when one started working there (both factories did this). Once you got fast at one operation, they'd either lay you off for a time, or move you to another machine. "Training wage" continued, because you of course had to be "trained" again. I made 800 pairs of shorts in one day, and was told I was too slow to earn minimum wage or be in the union.
I quit and went to college (a whole different financial struggle, but worth it). By the time I graduated in 1983, both factories had closed and operations had moved overseas.
In my opinion the automation of manufacturing in the automation of more and more of what humans do now means that it's more important that it be brought back to America not less. Like if the means of production are completely robotic and autonomous and owned by China then I think that puts us in a very vulnerable spot. I think the same is true if Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos own all of it too so I think we need to do more things like Donald Trump just did with the US steel deal and have a golden share of more of these companies.
Agreed that the US needs more control of manufacturing. But Trump talks about it as if the same number of jobs will be created in factories as there were decades ago. Lutnick was talking about Americans putting little screws into iPhones, for pity's sake. We need to be making the products here, but also making and licensing the technology for the robots and AI needed for modern manufacturing.
While an interesting article with lots of interesting points, making knowledge workers the boogie man is misguided.
Also those ancient cars that could be diagnosed by ear and fixed with common tools broke constantly and rarely lasted 100,000 miles rather than 250000 to 500000 miles that are common today. And those same cars where much more polluting than today's car.
I'm not saying that knowledge workers are a boogeyman I'm saying that the financialization of America in the gutting of our industrial infrastructure was a bad decision that had really bad consequences. And I'm not discounting that cars have improved I'm simply saying that we can no longer purchase cars from yesteryear and overall the amount of money we spend on Automotive Transportation has increased over time not decreased. The case that I'm making is that our metrics for measuring inflation are off.
I remember when the Volkswagen beetle showed up here--the price was $999.00. Some of those are still running, still repairable with basic tools. I do not know of any vehicle that "broke constantly", no matter where it was made. I dread the inevitable day when my 23 year old vehicle made in the USA which has been maintained meticulously and never given me any trouble whatsoever finally gives up and I am forced to buy one of the ridiculously priced automobiles stuffed with techno crap that neither I nor anybody else "needs".
I cannot count the times I had to find my friend in the desert with his ford bronco, my 1976 jeep Cherokee would stall going down the highway and not start often, 240Z needed tune ups and work all the time, my Dads scout had to have the carburetor worked on all the time often while broke down in the middle of the desert. Yes there are a few classic cars that people have kept going but that does not change the fact the modern cars are orders of magnitude more reliable than the cars or yore. Those old cars stink and pollute terribly. I cannot stand someone driving a classic car by me while riding the bicycle, the pollution is so intense and terrible. Electronic ignition and fuel injection are modern miracles.
BTW, that $1000 beetle would be $13000 today using what the author claims is wildly unrealistically low inflation.
I too found Bernie a great breath of fresh air, and 60 percent of Dems voted for him in our primary, and as I canvassed a lot of Republicans were convinced, too.
I was a State Delegate for Bernie in Hawaii, twice. What the DNC did to Bernie is the reason we have a fascist authoritarian dictatorship now. Hawaii went for Bernie by 70%. Bernie won every state if you discount superdelegates. And then they swung the next election by pushing the relentless narrative across all liberal media platforms, "Bernie can't win." That was the DNC's strategy, to create fear in the minds of the delegates and voters, and it worked. Bernie would have crushed Trump and paved the way for AOC. Even when God had the song bird land on Bernie's podium, while Trump was being attacked by a bald eagle, wasn't enough. We are so screwed now.
I worked for Bernie also. Then I watched Obama trash Bernie’s primary. If Bernie had been able to run his primary on a level field, he would be our president now.
I live in Keene, NH teaching Econ at State College. I got here 2000 and said, “oh, mf isn’t dead, look at all the jobs.” By 2009 the businesses had changed mgmt or left town. I checked, was shocked to see NH lost 30 percent of its mf jobs between 2001 and 2009! So did US as a whole. NOBODY WAS TALKING ABOUT IT. And then I met an entire family addicted to opioids at my kids’ school, and there was no help for them. Thank you.
And that's the most frustrating thing that I see with the Democratic party is for whatever reason they neither want to admit it or even when they do admit it they want to convince us that it's just gone that there's no way to manufacture in America again but it doesn't seem to be the case like it can be it's a policy choice we have we have to make the decision to do it. But like you see with these Trump tariffs just putting tariffs up does not make companies come back you've got to actually I think help them build and make it competitive.
Hearing we can't manufacture is infuriating. As long as there is Crypto and other bets thatthat political manipulation can make come out right, it's hard to incentivize people with money to invest in physical manufacturing and training of people. Attacking universities while implementing tariffs is the opposite of what we need: business supported universities, high schools, and community colleges precisely when our manufacturing capacity was greatest. My uncle was planning to be a machinist in high school in the 1950s when someone just offered him a scholarship to Notre Dame in engineering because that's what the society needed. P.S. https://www.dollarsandsense.org/rising-asset-bubbles-distort-the-industrial-base/
Excellent article. The gaslighting of working people in plain sight is breathtaking.
and so frustrating
That's one of the best posts I've read in a long time. I'm a 64 year old lifelong blue collar guy and I've lived what you said. And I totally agree that our lack of manufacturing will be the end of us. I can build or fix most anything, but the shit being built now isn't designed to be fixed, just thrown away. I'm sharing this with my 400+ subscribers immediately.
Thanks for saying so!
100% agree
I would also add the factor of talent distribution. The top 1% of talent is much more productive than the rest, and they have always been crucial to the “success” of a civilization. In the 70s, banking was still mostly boring, and the top students didn’t flock to it unless they came from money. As a result you had higher talent in academia, medicine (notable psychology), manufacturing, government (NASA and others), and other non-financial sectors.
Now the top students go into finance. VC and PE used to be tiny, now they are the only smart destination, and these are extractive, not productive. Top-class consulting is also popular, and increasingly pointed at optimizing arbitrage and extraction/pricing instead of organization or strategy. Finally (and mostly for immigrants) tech, though this is fading fast.
If no talent goes into manufacturing, it dies. Same for retail, academia, materials science, etc.
eah, exactly. There was a time when the top talent coming out of MIT or Stanford wanted to go build something—whether that meant joining NASA, working at the Department of Energy, or getting involved in big national projects or cutting-edge manufacturing.
They wanted to invent, develop, and produce—not just extract.
But like you said, Wall Street and the whole financialization model warped those incentives. Now the smartest folks get funneled into hedge funds, PE, VC, or consulting—industries that don’t build much of anything. Just skim value off the top.
And when top-tier talent disappears from real sectors—manufacturing, infrastructure, public R&D—those sectors wither. No amount of policy talk can fix that without changing where talent flows.
I agree and appreciate your clear and well-documented presentation. This also was and is Marianne Williamson’s message throughout her career, books, and campaign as Democratic candidate for president 2020 and 2024.
I've always been a big fan of hers.
I love the analogy of the rotten walls and the criminal in chief. Great communication the whole video and I say that as someone who loathes listening to podcasts.
Thank you. Your article says it all. I worry for my children and grandchildren.
I wrote an entire book arguing that manufacturing is central to the economy, and how to rebuild it -- in 2010, ManufacturingGreenProsperity.com has some free chapters. That became the basis of my GreenNewDealPlan.com that I set up in 2014, that shows how a Green New Deal can revive manufacturing. I recently wrote an article in Counterpunch (one of many), about the political ramifications, https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/11/29/the-something-in-the-we-gotta-do-something/, and also a full-throated defense of manufacturing at Medium, https://medium.com/@jonrynn/a-progressive-plan-to-revive-manufacturing-f08aeae5d094. Thanks for the article, see me at bluesky, https://bsky.app/profile/jonrynn.bsky.social
Thanks for giving my standard rant (from WNC) some articulation, facts and style. Mine is much more a sort of low growl in the general direction of Wall Street.
I like a low growl too.
Right now the Department of the Interior gave control over to DOGE and the selling off of our great public lands has begun. Forty years ago I drove my family out into the wilderness’s vast and amazing sites. Last year, I noticed road closed wires preventing that from happening now. I don’t think it’s too late, but we have to vote to make Congress take control back from the executive branch ASAP.
😩 It's crushing my soul. Vast wilderness, it's now only a facade. Take a look at the truth on Google Earth, humans have taken everything. There's nothing left.
Geee, if we'd only had heard Ross Perot when he talked about the "Giant Sucking Sound".
Richard Wolff has been harping on how the factories in New England moved to the mid-West, then to the South, then to Mexico. Business Schools preach "go where labor is cheap and the demand is high". Business is now in China.
Yet, Americans want to live in the past glory of their fathers and grandfathers. Hide their head in the sand and pretend that the criminal Oligarchy (which in the face of Trump actually has taken on a "mob voice) "really cares".
Even Norman Finkelstein no longer uses the term Zionist.
So let's be trite and repeat "All wars are bankers wars."
Now.... what are we going to do about it?
Putin and Xi, new heroes for the working class.
The AIPAC controlled Congress is the enemy, and by extension: Israel.
Only one third of our mf jobs went to China, per David Autor who is credited with saying the jobs went to China. My guess is financial engineering took the other two-thirds. There is a good novel by John Hacket who was cfo of Cummins engine, it’s self published on Amazon, where he explains how finance guys and lawyers shake value out of firms and dismantle them. I also wrote in Dollars & Sense about Timken’s deccumulation of capital.
Absolutely they've gone all across the world not just to China. We just decided that it wasn't something we wanted to do the rich and the elite made more money destroying our Industries and infrastructure than building it. It's also much easier to sell things that were built over multiple generations and it is to continue building.
We're simply repeating history here - an incompetent POTUS (Hoover) creating unnecessary economic hardship (tariffs and closing the doors on immigrants) during spectacular Wall Street speculation (Great Depression) while robber barons (Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, JP Morgan, etc) focus on transferring wealth from the bottom 90% to their pockets. Sound familiar?
There are some key differences, mainly that we are not already in a material depression, the authoritarians have already seized sizable control of government institutions, the DNC is led by neo-liberals who've historically sided with wealthy individuals and corporations over the contituents they represent, and the billionaire oligarchs today are driven by a desire for feudal technocracy to own countries that they become monarchs of (thanks, in part, to Curtis Yarvin), and leasing the assets of their respective territories back to the people at inflated costs.
FDR was the Bernie of the time. "They [the oligarhcs] are unanimous in their hatred for me, and I welcome their hatred." He pulled the working class out of poverty, reinforced workers' rights and regulations on financial instruments, initiated near 95% taxes on the wealthiest Americans highest earnings, and was in the process of implementing universal healthcare.
I don't know how we win this class war. How do we overcome the struggle of a progressive breaking out of the DNC that has worked so hard to keep progressives in check? How do we unify the message of voters (even progressives) torn by identity politics, and redirect them to focus on one collective aim: to right this economic ship toward the rights and well-being of the working class? Democrats are consistently split on what the message should be (LGBTQ+, civil rights, etc), when the answer should be that all those issues are directly and indirectly caused by a lack of economic justice and fairness.
I am truly skeptical of how we make progress. I will always vote for the progressive voice in the party (today, AOC); however, I want to fundamentally understand what our action plan is to get these people motivated by equality more than money elected.
I wonder about if we are not already in a material depression. You look at the numbers of homeless people in CA, and wow, some people are feeling like they are in an extreme depression. Hard for young families to find housing, they actually face eviction even with jobs. Teachers also feel like its just downhill, and has been for like 15 years. Nurses who work in hospitals are under intense pressure. Maybe our data collectors are not really measuring what a lot of people are experiencing.
Again, Corbin is attracting the best, most potent, writer-commenters I've seen anywhere generally on social media :)
I do agree that we need to have more manufacturing here, and more people who have the ability need to go into the building/maintenance trades (plumbers, car mechanics, carpenters, etc.) We still need workers in those fields. New manufacturing, though, will rely more on automation -- when I was in fifth grade, I asked my teacher about this "If robots do the work, what will people do for a living?" and got laughed at.
But all the factory jobs in the past weren't "living wage" either. I worked in two different garment factories in the mid-1970's, after graduating high school, before college in a three-year gap. Supposedly we had a union, but I never heard much from them. The workforce was mostly women, doing piecework. They paid a sub-minimum "training wage" for an indefinite time when one started working there (both factories did this). Once you got fast at one operation, they'd either lay you off for a time, or move you to another machine. "Training wage" continued, because you of course had to be "trained" again. I made 800 pairs of shorts in one day, and was told I was too slow to earn minimum wage or be in the union.
I quit and went to college (a whole different financial struggle, but worth it). By the time I graduated in 1983, both factories had closed and operations had moved overseas.
In my opinion the automation of manufacturing in the automation of more and more of what humans do now means that it's more important that it be brought back to America not less. Like if the means of production are completely robotic and autonomous and owned by China then I think that puts us in a very vulnerable spot. I think the same is true if Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos own all of it too so I think we need to do more things like Donald Trump just did with the US steel deal and have a golden share of more of these companies.
Agreed that the US needs more control of manufacturing. But Trump talks about it as if the same number of jobs will be created in factories as there were decades ago. Lutnick was talking about Americans putting little screws into iPhones, for pity's sake. We need to be making the products here, but also making and licensing the technology for the robots and AI needed for modern manufacturing.
While an interesting article with lots of interesting points, making knowledge workers the boogie man is misguided.
Also those ancient cars that could be diagnosed by ear and fixed with common tools broke constantly and rarely lasted 100,000 miles rather than 250000 to 500000 miles that are common today. And those same cars where much more polluting than today's car.
I'm not saying that knowledge workers are a boogeyman I'm saying that the financialization of America in the gutting of our industrial infrastructure was a bad decision that had really bad consequences. And I'm not discounting that cars have improved I'm simply saying that we can no longer purchase cars from yesteryear and overall the amount of money we spend on Automotive Transportation has increased over time not decreased. The case that I'm making is that our metrics for measuring inflation are off.
I remember when the Volkswagen beetle showed up here--the price was $999.00. Some of those are still running, still repairable with basic tools. I do not know of any vehicle that "broke constantly", no matter where it was made. I dread the inevitable day when my 23 year old vehicle made in the USA which has been maintained meticulously and never given me any trouble whatsoever finally gives up and I am forced to buy one of the ridiculously priced automobiles stuffed with techno crap that neither I nor anybody else "needs".
I cannot count the times I had to find my friend in the desert with his ford bronco, my 1976 jeep Cherokee would stall going down the highway and not start often, 240Z needed tune ups and work all the time, my Dads scout had to have the carburetor worked on all the time often while broke down in the middle of the desert. Yes there are a few classic cars that people have kept going but that does not change the fact the modern cars are orders of magnitude more reliable than the cars or yore. Those old cars stink and pollute terribly. I cannot stand someone driving a classic car by me while riding the bicycle, the pollution is so intense and terrible. Electronic ignition and fuel injection are modern miracles.
BTW, that $1000 beetle would be $13000 today using what the author claims is wildly unrealistically low inflation.
The point of the article—and the whole debate around inflation—is this:
The number of years of work it takes at the median wage to buy a car has gone way up since 1970 or 1980. It takes a lot more time today to afford one.
Yeah, cars might be better now—safer, faster, more high-tech—and that matters for how they function
But it doesn’t matter when we’re talking about affordability.
And if something’s less affordable, then all the talk about inflation being “under control” just doesn’t hold up.
Huh. Obviously vastly different experiences. But, then, I don't live in a desert--maybe that's the difference.
I agree. Many FOX talking points and misinformation in that article.
What are the fox talking points in misinformation that you're describing I'm very curious?