On Sun, 10 Aug 2003 19:59:23 -0400, Tom Quackenbush wrote:
On Sun, 10 Aug 2003 18:37:45 -0400, Gary R Coffman
wrote:
SNIP

They'd only all be unemployed if you made the assumption
that they're all employed in manufacturing now. But that's
an unwarranted assumption. In fact, less than 8% of the
US workforce is employed in manufacturing now.

The US economy is not primarily a manufacturing economy,
and it hasn't been one for at least 50 years. Even then that
was just a blip caused by war time production requirements.
Over the course of the last century, the primary occupation
of the US work force has moved from agriculture to service
jobs, with a short period of domination by manufacturing
centered during and just after WWII.

Gary

Hmm. Interesting stat. One (this one, anyway) tends to think of the
US economy in terms of steel mills, car manufacturing, etc.

What you say has the ring of truth, but I'll ask anyway:
Do you have any cites? To be more precise (I'm pretty sure you DO
have cites), would you post cites?

http://www.fedstats.gov/qf/states/00000.html

Total US civilian labor force is 141,815,000.
Total manufacturing employment is 17,698,000
or about 12.5% of the total work force (13.4%
of nonfarm employment). That's a little higher
than I'd recalled. The largest segment is the
service segment at 65.2%.

Note that government employment (nonmilitary)
at 15.8% is larger than manufacturing.

Gary