No Golden Age for U.S. Manufacturing

From the Economist last week - Not Quite What it Seems: Talk of a renaissance in American manufacturing is overblown:

"Data on jobs also suggest that manufacturing is not entering another golden age.  That is less surprising, since with better technology manufacturing is becoming ever less labour-intensive.  Nonetheless, the post-recession rise in manufacturing employment is one of the weakest in memory.  According to the Economic Policy Institute think tank, if employment had followed the trend of the average recovery in the years since 1945, then an extra 1.2 million manufacturing jobs would have been created by the third quarter of 2014.  In fact, 800,000 or so appeared.  Manufacturing job growth, though it has seen a few brisk years, has barely kept up with that of the workforce as a whole."