News Station

by Mark Silva

Brian Williams already has gotten a lot of public mileage out of his private time with President Barack Obama, in preparation for a day-in-the-life of the president series that NBC News will air this week, Tuesday and Wednesday nights.

The anchorman got the president to walk his Supreme Court nominee back from the remark she made about the relative wisdom of Latino women, as compared with white men. He got the president to say that he's not interested in the government owning GM. -- just a 60 percent stake, for now.

"Our viewers will see a view of the White House never televised before,'' Williims says of his program, Inside the Obama White House. "Senior staff, the president himself, the first lady and yes... Bo will make an appearance with us on television.''

Williams tells of a president who is not confined to the Oval Office, who walks from study to study dropping in on sessions, popping m&m's for snacks along the way.

"We had something like 20 camera crews....we have something like 150 hours of video tape,'' he says, and that's after a day in the White House last week, which Williams will follow up with another interview of Obama on Tuesday. "e're going through all of this to distill it down to two hours.

Williams also got a cheeseburger out of the deal - joining the president in his outing for a take-out pickup of burgers at a Five Guys in Washington.

Williams also asked Obama about the early part of his day that he hadn't seen: "I got my workout in,'' Obama said, "saw the girls off to school... always eat a hearty breakfast.''

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What's the administration's specific aim in bailing out GM? I'll give you my theory later.

For now, though, some background. First and most broadly, it doesn't make sense for America to try to maintain or enlarge manufacturing as a portion of the economy. Even if the U.S. were to seal its borders and bar any manufactured goods from coming in from abroad -- something I don't recommend -- we'd still be losing manufacturing jobs. That's mainly because of technology.

When we think of manufacturing jobs, we tend to imagine old-time assembly lines populated by millions of blue-collar workers who had well-paying jobs with good benefits. But that picture no longer describes most manufacturing. I recently toured a U.S. factory containing two employees and 400 computerized robots. The two live people sat in front of computer screens and instructed the robots. In a few years this factory won't have a single employee on site, except for an occasional visiting technician who repairs and upgrades the robots.

Factory jobs are vanishing all over the world. Even China is losing them. The Chinese are doing more manufacturing than ever, but they're also becoming far more efficient at it. They've shuttered most of the old state-run factories. Their new factories are chock full of automated and computerized machines. As a result, they don't need as many manufacturing workers as before.

Economists at Alliance Capital Management took a look at employment trends in 20 large economies and found that between 1995 and 2002 -- before the asset bubble and subsequent bust -- 22 million manufacturing jobs disappeared. The U.S. wasn't even the biggest loser. We lost about 11 percent of our manufacturing jobs in that period, but the Japanese lost 16 percent of theirs. Even developing nations lost factory jobs: Brazil suffered a 20 percent decline, and China had a 15 percent drop.

What happened to manufacturing? In two words, higher productivity. As productivity rises, employment falls because fewer people are needed. In this, manufacturing is following the same trend as agriculture. A century ago, almost 30 percent of adult Americans worked on a farm. Nowadays, fewer than 5 percent do. That doesn't mean the U.S. failed at agriculture. Quite the opposite. American agriculture is a huge success story. America can generate far larger crops than a century ago with far fewer people. New technologies, more efficient machines, new methods of fertilizing, better systems of crop rotation, and efficiencies of large scale have all made farming much more productive.

Manufacturing is analogous. In America and elsewhere around the world, it's a success. Since 1995, even as manufacturing employment has dropped around the world, global industrial output has risen more than 30 percent.

More after the jump.

--Robert Reich

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