Foxconn is flailing in Wisconsin (Insert your joke here.) UPDATED

In what may end up as the biggest economic development failure in U.S. history, Foxconn announced Wednesday that its $10 billion Wisconsin factory will not be a factory. Instead, the company says, it will still create 13,000 jobs, but these will be research jobs rather than manufacturing ones. I'll believe it when I see it.

Accompanied by an almost $4.8 billion subsidy package as estimated by Good Jobs First (follow the link to the spreadsheet), the project was heavily criticized even before it was announced in 2017 (my take here and here). The massive subsidy helped normalize the idea of multi-billion investment incentives and gave Amazon a handy benchmark for its own effort to break the bank.

As I analyzed a year and a half ago, it didn't make sense to manufacture electronics in the United States when everything was cheaper in China, unless you were worried about access to the U.S. market. The illegitimate Trump regime had already created an unpredictable and protectionist trade climate, and this was long before the trade war with China really took off. If Foxconn felt it had to locate in the United States, the country was in a strong bargaining position, but by playing the states off against each other, it was still possible for a foreign company to score huge subsidies.

What happens next? As noted, Foxconn still says it will build a huge facility and hire 13,000 workers. But in 2018, it failed to meet its job creation target and forfeited what would have been a $9.5 million subsidy. I predict we will see more such failures from Foxconn until it finally pulls the plug. Indeed, on January 31, Good Jobs First called for the immediate cancellation of the deal, with the company financially responsible for expenses made by the state and by Racine County in connection with the project. This would be a fair resolution of the situation, appropriately leaving egg on the faces of the deal's promoters, the recently defeated Governor Scott Walker and the head of the illegitimate Trump regime.

As you see, I have managed to steer clear of the obvious puns. Instead, I invite you to insert your joke here.

UPDATE: Foxconn now says that it will indeed still build a factory, citing a conversation between CEO Terry Gou and Trump (h/t commenter Joel at Angry Bear). This is certainly clear as mud. As others have pointed out, several promised investments from Foxconn have failed to materialize at anywhere near the scale promised, including in Brazil, Pennsylvania, Indonesia, Vietnam, and India. So I am going to remain skeptical on what was a terrible deal in the first place.

Cross-posted at Angry Bear.

Is the Growth of Manufacturing Production a Mirage?

A lot of people lament the decline in manufacturing employment, which has fallen by about 1/3 since 2000. As Upjohn Institute economist Susan Houseman points out in the linked article, we're talking about 5.5 million lost manufacturing jobs in that time frame. Here's what it looks like in long perspective

Instead of recovering as it did in previous recessions, after the 2001 recession manufacturing employment continued to fall, as Houseman points out.

But a number of commentators, including Matthew Yglesias and some more conservative ones cited by Houseman, have argued that what we really ought to be looking at is manufacturing output, which has risen steadily except for small blips during recessions.

What's wrong with needing fewer people in manufacturing due to greatly increased productivity?

Houseman argues that the increased productivity is a mirage, due to a single industry, computers. She writes:

Real value added in the computer industry grew at a staggering rate of 22 percent per year from 1997 to 2007 and 16 percent per year from 2000 to 2010. In contrast, average growth of real value added in the rest of manufacturing was just 1.2 percent per year from 1997 to 2007; real value added in the rest of manufacturing was actually about 6 percent lower in 2010 than at the start of the decade.

With that kind of growth, many multiples of GDP growth, we must be an export powerhouse in computers and electronics, right? (Insert joke here.)*

Of course we aren't, so where does that gigantic growth rate come from? If you remember the debates over inflation that gave us the Boskin Commission, you will recall that one of its criticisms of Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index (CPI) data was it did not adequately account for improvements in quality over time. Houseman argues that the huge increases in computer power and semiconductor processing speed are what are beneath the apparently massive growth in productivity in the industry. In other words, the price deflators used to calculate real growth are the real reason productivity is apparently growing so rapidly in computers.

If Houseman is right, it means that falling manufacturing employment really is a problem; we have not become so productive that we simply need fewer manufacturing workers. And the fact that productivity is growing by leaps and bounds, yet our trade deficit in electronics keeps getting worse, seems to me to be strong evidence that she is on to something.


* From the Austin Lounge Lizards song, "The Drugs I Need."

Cross-posted with Angry Bear.