Perhaps it’s the natural human aversion to bad news—sometimes known as the “ostrich effect”—but few opinion leaders on U.S. economic policy appear willing to take a cold, hard look at the state of U.S. manufacturing. If they did, as Rob Atkinson writes in the National Review, they wouldn’t be happy. First, U.S. manufacturing suffered catastrophic losses in employment and output in the 2000s; then its recovery in the 2010s was only modest; and now it faces existential challenges from a resurgent China that is well practiced in the dark arts of “innovation mercantilism.”
