Detroit's destruction began in its heyday

Thomas J. Sugrue's The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (1997) is a great book -- and in some ways a simple one.  It provides extensive, fine-grained documentation of two or three (depending on how you count) relentless forces that destroyed Detroit.

The first was the hemorrhaging of manufacturing jobs that was in full flow by the early fifties, and could only have been stemmed by national industrial policies unthinkable in the United States: a rollback of Taft-Hartley's enablement of state right-to-work laws; a German-style role for labor in corporate management; legal restrictions on companies' right to lay off workers or move manufacturing operations as they saw fit.

The second was the vicious, rooted, legally codified and government-sanctioned racism that kept African Americans at the bottom of the labor totem pole, consigning them to the hardiest, dirtiest, poorest-paying and least secure factory jobs and excluding them skilled crafts, retail service and a host of other occupations.

Our future is not in manufacturing

As U.S. unemployment remains stubbornly, dangerously, high, calls mount for a manufacturing revival.  Hence James Fallows, blogging today from Aspen, puts forward a critique of the U.S. economy by Bharat Balasubramanian an engineering executive from Daimler AG in Germany, linking income inequality in the U.S. with a dearth of good manufacturing jobs:

"I will state that there will be a polarization of society here in the United States. People who are using their brains are moving up. Then you have another part of society that is doing services. These services will not be paid well. But you would need services. You would need restaurants, you would need cooks, you would need drivers et cetera. You will be losing your middle class.

"This I would not see in the same fashion in Europe, because the manufacturing base there today can compete anywhere, anytime with China or India. Because their productivity and skill sets more than offset their higher costs. You don't see this everywhere, but it's Germany, it's France, it's Sweden, it's Austria, it's Switzerland.... So I feel Europe still will have a middle level of people. They also have people who are very rich, they also have people doing services. But there is a balance. I don't see the balance here in the US."

Also today, Joe Klein, grudgingly admitting that increased hiring on Wall Street is good news of sorts, indulges in a prescriptive wish:

I guess I'm an economic curmudgeon, but I'd be a lot happier if the headline was: Green Energy Hiring Boom or Auto Industry Rebounds Strongly. But what we may be looking at is a continuation of the disease that forced the bailout in the first place: a distorted economy, where too many of the profits come from making deals and too few come from making things.

Making deals, bad; making things, good: that reminds me of the late-80s complaints that while Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry focused Japanese resources on vital industries, U.S. government planners didn't distinguish between production of microchips and potato chips when distributing government largesse.

Doubtless, it's good policy for the U.S. government to stimulate/incent development of "industries of the future" such as alternative energy and biotech.  Doubtless, the growth of such industries would stimulate some good, high-skilled manufacturing jobs -- for a while at least, though technological development tends over time to destroy manufacturing jobs rather than create them.  And yes, the U.S. financial sector has grabbed a bloated share of profits and has been a brain drain from other occupations demanding intense mental labor.

Still, I doubt that rising income inequality in the U.S. can be traced to a failure to generate good  manufacturing jobs. And I doubt that increasing the proportion of the U.S. labor force engaged in manufacturing is either a likely or desirable means restoring income growth, reducing income inequality, or raising job and life satisfaction levels in the U.S. In his 2010 book Rebound: Why America Will Emerge Stronger from the Financial Crisis, Stephen J. Rose shows that the steady shrinkage of the manufacturing sector over the past half century has on balance benefited U.S. workers.