[Mase]

But I find it offensive when someone disparages and dismisses my work without a coherent basis for doing so.

Thanks for the link to Ikenson's reply. What he says about PCR above has pretty much been PCR's MO since I joined the forum. This is exactly how our resident paleos reacted to Ikenson's original piece on manufacturing.

[Toddsterpatriot]

Obviously, corporations that arbitrage labor and replace their US employees with less expensive foreign labor are going to enjoy greater growth in profits and value added.

This certainly explains why foreign automakers keep opening plants in the US.

[1rudeboy]

They really don't have much of a choice (with regard to reactions). Note that PCR cedes to the notion that our manufacturing sector is plugging right along. His contention is that the healthiest portion of the sector is plugging along with imported goods (meaning that the U.S. manufacturers that are importing are driving the U.S. manufacturers that do not into the ground--"import competition"). He "carelessly" [chuckle] claims that Ikenson's data shows it.

Ikenson writes,

First of all, nowhere in my paper do I attribute the health of U.S. manufacturing to import competition. The only passage from which such an interpretation might be drawn (by a careless reader, I would add) is this one: “Revenues, profits, output, value added, and even compensation rose the most for industries most exposed to import competition, and they rose the least for those industries experiencing the smallest increases in imports.” That is just a statement of fact, as gleaned from the data. It assigns no causation to import competition.

[]

Second, my failure to distinguish between sources of imports in no way undermines the central points of my paper. The purpose of my paper (“Thriving in a Global Economy: The Truth about U.S. Manufacturing and Trade”) was simply to evaluate the health of the U.S. manufacturing sector. The conventional wisdom holds that U.S. manufacturing is eroding, the country is de-industrializing, and that import competition is the driving force behind this trend. We hear this all the time. Politicians tell us. Op-ed page writers remind us. Lou Dobbs warns us. And members of Congress have proposed all sorts of punitive trade legislation under the banner of arresting and reversing manufacturing decline.

I set out simply to assess the credibility of the premise. My approach was straightforward, honest, and devoid of ideology. There was no shell game or sleight of hand. I found the most relevant, comprehensible, comprehensive, objective statistics that speak to the health of the sector, presented those data, and offered conclusions that are easily verifiable (i.e., not confused by economic modeling or econometrics or the debatable assumptions upon which such approaches often rely).