Justin Wolfers Professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan, a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and author of a widely used i...

“Manufacturing jobs is basically what rich people think poor people want.”

Platypus Economics with Justin Wolfers · Money & Markets · September 2026

Context

Asked whether economics has anything useful to say about rebuilding America's industrial base, Wolfers turned the question around and asked why anyone would want to. He allows for national-security exceptions, then points out that manufacturing paid above-average wages in the 1950s and pays below-average ones now. This line is his account of why the goal keeps its appeal anyway.

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Transcript

Platypus Economics with Justin Wolfers Around 16:55 into the episode

Justin Wolfers

…approved of that than disapproved. Americans are actually on the side, like regular Americans, are on the side of regular Canadians right now. They think the way the United States is treating Canada is terrible. And they seem to believe that Canada has every right and reason to fight back.

Speaker 2

…part of a long-term strategy to kind of rebuild America's industrial base or manufacturing capacity. Obviously, that has not happened. But is there anything that economics can tell us about how to achieve that goal in the medium term? Or maybe you think that that's not a meaningful goal to achieve?

Justin Wolfers

…I want is more manufacturing jobs. That what I want is my son or daughter to wake up in the morning and wear steel-toed boots and carry a lunch pail to a factory, punch in, work in the factory, punch out, go home. And in the 1960s, manufacturing job was the pathway to the middle class and had a lot to recommend it. Today, that's less clear. I've actually looked at some survey research on this. Manufacturing jobs is basically what rich people think poor people want. But if you talk to a manufacturing worker and you ask them about their hopes and dreams and aspirations for their kids, it's not to be punching in and out of a noisy or dirty factory. In fact, it's to take the sorts of white-collar or possibly pink-collar jobs that are less hard on the body that the administration seems to deride so much. So a different way of saying all of this is: I just want…

Speaker 2

Is there an equivalent to what you just said to white-collar jobs and AI? Is that the future that people are scared about happening now?

Justin Wolfers

You just made everything I said so much harder. And that's so mean of you, Augusta. Look, the truth is when the agricultural revolution happened, people were terrified we were going to lose our way of life. And at some level, we did lose our way of life. We're no longer on farms. We no longer see…

Speaker 2

Thank you, Justin, and thank you to everybody watching. We really hope you enjoyed this episode of The Professor Is In, and also that you learned something along the way. If you would like your questions answered in a future segment, leave a comment wherever you're reading this or watching it or…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

More from Platypus Economics with Justin Wolfers

“Some people say, oh, well, most people are fine with unemployment because only 4% of people are unemployed. That's true. But at the microeconomic level, there's always people entering and always people exiting. And by the end of the year, many, many, many more than 4% of the population will have experienced some degree of unemployment.” — Justin Wolfers, Platypus Economics with Justin Wolfers