Posted on 03/17/2026 2:00:49 PM PDT by lasereye
This chart shows manufacturing production growth (6-month average vs. a year ago). After spending most of 2022–2024 in contraction, output has surged since mid-2025 and is now approaching +2% — the strongest growth since the post-COVID rebound.
So why isn't anyone talking about it?
Partly because it's invisible in the jobs data. Manufacturing payrolls have been declining. If you only look at employment, you'd think the sector is still struggling.
But flat jobs + rising output = productivity growth. The sector is producing significantly more with fewer workers.
This is one more piece of evidence that the productivity acceleration story is real and broadening beyond tech. The gains are showing up in hard, measurable output, but not in headcount.
Source: Federal Reserve Board
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Gad Levanon is Chief Economist at The Burning Glass Institute. He also teaches economics at NYU.
Gad holds a Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University, and as a native of Israel, he holds undergraduate and master's degrees from Tel Aviv University. From 1996 to 1998 he worked at the Israeli Central Bank where he participated in the analysis of financial markets and monetary policy.
You can count on the legacy media keeping that quiet.
Or the media will say that workers are being worked to death for Big Wall Street or whatever.
If “manufacturing [was] having its best stretch in years” during the Biden-Autopen presidency, it sure wouldn’t have been doing so “quietly,” of that I’m existentially certain.
“If you only look at employment, you’d think the sector is still struggling.”
This has been the case for 40 years. The US has been for a long time a manufacturing powerhouse. 2nd only to China in total output but obliterating it in per capita output. This is what is so ridiculous about our trade war. Jobs jobs jobs are never coming back and will continue to decline. Just as farming did and as info tech is about to.
In fact, the trade war will help decrease manufacturing jobs while increasing output.
Your post is ludicrous.
Aerospace / Manufacturing sector in Huntsville “Rocket City”, Alabama are looking really good.
Manufacturing in the U.S. now is a placeholder for these globalists who have already shown they're willing to move manufacturing anywhere they can.
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