, Columnist
Trump's Industrial Rebirth Is a Dead End
There's no future in the U.S. for old-line manufacturers that dominated the mid-20th century economy.
Would anyone even want this again?
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President Donald Trump's economic adviser, Peter Navarro, has vowed to restore U.S. manufacturing supremacy. This is no surprise -- Trump's election campaign emphasized the promise of a return to the industrial economy of the mid-20th century, before countries such as China supplanted the U.S. as the workshop of the world.
But this push is unlikely to succeed. Changes in the U.S. industrial mix, and in technology itself, mean there's no going back to the economy of yesteryear. To understand why this is true, everyone should read "The New Geography of Jobs," by University of California-Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti. It's probably the most important popular economics book of the decade.