After suffering major job losses in the 2000s, the U.S. manufacturing industry is in the midst of a significant turnaround and is quickly becoming one of the central pillars in the economic recovery. However, because of the changing nature of the industry, new measures aside from job growth are needed to track its success. This not to say that job growth should be ignored, but it is not as central a measure as it once was.
There are a variety of reasons for the need for new measures to track growth in the manufacturing industry. U.S. manufacturing has become more specialized than in the 2000s or anytime before, and workers have learned to adapt and have become better trained and more technologically savvy. This makes them more productive, changing the manufacturing output to worker ratio significantly in the industry as a whole. The changing nature of the typical manufacturing worker is bound to revolutionize the industry and force experts to experiment with a range of new measures with which to evaluate the health of manufacturing.
Two other crucial factors that call for new measures to track manufacturing output are the energy boom and the consequent automation of the industry on a larger scale. Cheaper American-produced energy, due to increased natural gas production and new ways to access shale deposits economically, has allowed U.S. manufacturers to begin running factories with significant energy needs. In the past, many of those factories would have been previously unfeasible to operate.
The renaissance in U.S. manufacturing has not only made the industry a central part of the economic recovery, but has also led U.S. legislators to refocus their attention on an industry that many had given up for dead. This new legislative attention, which includes but is not limited to the passage of the Revitalize American Manufacturing and Innovation Act of 2013, promises to infuse manufacturing with new federal incentives and expand connections with technology developers, research universities and commercial entities. Such relationships facilitate enhanced innovation and necessitate new measures for analyzing the changing success of the industry.
Given the extensive and pervasive nature of all these wide-ranging changes, it might be said that it would be surprising if economists and industry experts did not come up with dozens of new measures with which to measure the success of the industry.
It is, however, difficult to imagine a situation in which job growth within an industry is not considered an important measure of the industry's health and its future prospects. While the current job growth in U.S. manufacturing does not fully reflect the monumental turnaround evident industry-wide, the numbers are clearly on the rise and seem poised to continue this trend as everyone adjusts to the new measures with which to evaluate the industry.
(Photo courtesy of Stoonn / freedigitalphotos.net)
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