Can Tariffs Bring Manufacturing Jobs Back?

Willy Shih says tariffs do not bring ordinary manufacturing jobs back, because the United States is a high-cost country and a returning job has to pay for itself. The work that comes back uses a lot of automation and high skill, or it is something nobody else knows how to do.

The jobs that pass that test mostly never left. He points to the high-temperature superalloys in the hot section of a jet engine. Two of the companies that can cast them are in the United States and one is in the United Kingdom, and buyers in the rest of the world, including in China, have to purchase them from the West. Jet engines are the same kind of lead. The United States, France, and the United Kingdom supply them to the world market.

If the work is highly productive or highly differentiated, it can be done in the United States and done well. A tariff that ignores that test does not recreate an earlier generation of factory jobs. Manufacturing has changed everywhere, and the jobs that stay are the ones that can carry a high labor cost.