The Rise and Fall of American Manufacturing: From Bethlehem Steel to the Modern Era

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Uploaded: 2026-02-15T12:30:19.145774+00:00
Channel: المخبر الاقتصادي - Mokhbir Eqtisadi
Description: Summary and key takeaways on The Rise and Fall of American Manufacturing: From Bethlehem Steel to the Modern Era, covering Introduction The episode of The

المخبر الاقتصادي - Mokhbir Eqtisadi

Feb 15, 2026

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3 min read

YouTube video ID: 5c-64AK1M3Q

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Introduction

The episode of The Economic Informant paints a vivid picture of how American manufacturing went from a global powerhouse to a sector in decline. Using the story of Tom Cruise – a fictional Bethlehem Steel worker – the narrator walks us through the golden age, the shocks that eroded it, and the policy debates shaping its future.

The Golden Age – Bethlehem Steel

Bethlehem Steel in the 1950s‑60s: One of the world’s largest steel producers and shipbuilders, employing ~150,000 workers.
Iconic projects: Empire State Building beams, U.S. battleships, heavy artillery.
Worker prosperity: High wages, home ownership, solid pensions – the archetype of the mid‑century American middle class.
Geographic reach: Plants from Indiana to New York, a symbol of national industrial pride.

Post‑War Boom and Mass Production

Eli Whitney’s legacy: Interchangeable parts and the birth of mass production.
World War II: Massive expansion of shipbuilding and other heavy industries; the U.S. controlled two‑thirds of the world’s shipping fleet.
Labor unions: Strong bargaining power, capped executive pay, and a share of corporate profits flowing to workers.

The Beginning of the Slide

Vietnam War: Drained Treasury, rising inflation, weakening dollar.
1971 – End of the Gold Standard: Nixon’s move ended Bretton Woods, creating monetary instability.
1973 Oil Shock: OPEC embargo quadrupled energy prices, squeezing manufacturing margins.
Rise of foreign competition: Japan, South Korea, West Germany invested heavily in R&D while U.S. firms faced rising labor and pension costs.

Structural Shifts

From goods to ideas: Daniel Bell’s The Coming of Post‑Industrial Society (1973) predicted a move toward services and knowledge economies.
NAFTA (1993): Signaled a policy focus on free trade and cheap imports, sidelining domestic industrial development.

The China Shock & the Apple Effect

China joins WTO (2001): Within a decade China becomes the world’s largest exporter, outpacing the U.S. in low‑tech goods.
Apple’s model (2012): Showed that high‑value design could stay in the U.S. while mass production moved abroad, encouraging many firms to offshore.
Result: U.S. low‑tech manufacturing jobs vanished; e.g., North Carolina lost >60,000 furniture jobs.

Modern Challenges

Tariffs under Trump (2025‑2026): Intended to revive factories but coincided with a 60% drop in monthly job creation compared to 2024.
BCI Solutions case study: Workforce fell from 240 to 130; capacity dropped to 52% of historic levels.
Manufacturing employment: ~12.7 million jobs by Dec 2025 – the lowest since March 2022.
Executive‑worker pay gap: From 21× in 1965 to 290× in 2023 (603× among the 100 largest firms).

Policy Debates and Possible Paths Forward

Massive government investment: Emulate China’s direct support for advanced manufacturing.
Workforce upskilling: Train workers in high‑tech skills, though education system challenges remain.
Indirect reshoring: Relocate critical industries to near‑shore partners (Canada, Mexico) to keep supply chains short without costly tariffs.
Automation & “dark factories”: Long‑term solution requires embracing technology while protecting workers.

Conclusion

The decline of American manufacturing is not the result of a single policy or external enemy. It stems from a cascade of economic shocks, strategic policy choices, and a shift in corporate culture that prioritized shareholder returns over reinvestment in factories and workers. Reversing the trend will demand coordinated, long‑term strategies rather than quick‑fix tariffs.

American manufacturing fell from a post‑war golden age to a marginal sector because of successive economic shocks, policy shifts, and a move toward offshoring; rebuilding it will require sustained public investment, workforce retraining, and smarter supply‑chain strategies, not just tariffs.

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Full Transcript YouTube

The man sitting there, proudly listening to U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower, is an American citizen named Tom Cruise.
Not that famous actor, no. He’s a worker at Bethlehem Steel, the company located in the city of the same name in Pennsylvania.
Tom is comfortable. He owns a house and a car. He earns a very good salary, and a solid pension is waiting for him when he retires.
That was the American worker in the 1950s and 1960s.
And if you worked for a company like Bethlehem Steel, that was simply your reality.
In the mid-1950s, Bethlehem Steel was one of the largest steel producers and shipbuilders in the world.
At the height of its prosperity, the company stretched across America,
from Indiana to Pennsylvania, Maryland, New York, and many other states.
Its steel was everywhere and in every major project, from the beams of the iconic Empire State Building
to the steel used in U.S. battleships and heavy artillery at the time.
The company employed around 150,000 people, most of them from industrial cities.
It paid high wages and played a crucial role in the economies of those communities.
Back then, Bethlehem Steel embodied the state of American steel manufacturing.
The United States had the finest steel mills in the world, and Bethlehem was a symbol of American industrial pride.
Some of you are probably asking: How come we’ve never heard of this company before? Where is it now?
That’s a very fair question. Let me show you.
This was one of the company’s most important industrial sites, 120 acres of land.
Today, that land hosts a handful of development projects and research centers, including a hotel and a casino.
The pride of American industry, a company with a history spanning more than 140 years, no longer exists.
It declared bankruptcy in 2001, was dissolved two years later in 2003, and what remained was sold off.
I told you this brief story because it is just one of many that reveal how American industry deteriorated.
For decades, the United States was the industrial fortress of the world, the factory of the globe before China.
It had the best manufacturing base, fueled by some of the most advanced research and the most brilliant innovations of its time.
Yet today, American industry has been struggling, badly, for many years.
Who is killing American manufacturing? How did an industry that was the gold standard of global production in the last century
collapse like this? Who is responsible , China, or someone else? And can Trump restore the golden age of American industry,
or is this decline larger than him and larger than America’s institutions themselves?
That’s part of what we’ll be discussing today in a new episode from our Global Industry series,
a series where we explore manufacturing sectors in different countries and examine what lessons we might draw
for our own Arab economies. If you haven’t seen the previous episodes, you should definitely check them out,
you’ll find them in the playlist under the same name.
Before we begin, I’d like to remind you of the suffering of our people in Gaza and Sudan.
To this day, aid is reaching Gaza only in limited amounts, especially critical supplies such as medical equipment,
winter clothing, maintenance materials, and temporary housing.
These are essential needs that the occupation still prevents from entering the Strip.
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Speak about them consistently so that our people’s voices remain present and are never forgotten.
The second thing is your subscription to the channel.
Subscribing, liking, commenting, and sharing our content are among the most important ways you can support our work.
So don’t forget to subscribe if you haven’t already.
Now, let’s dive into the remarkable story of the decline of American industry.
I’m Ashraf Ibrahim, and this is The Economic Informant.
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At a time when Trump believes, and will continue to believe, that America’s golden age has returned,
and that his tariffs will make American manufacturing great again,
we need to look at the perspective of an ordinary American citizen: J.B. Brown.
J.B. Brown is the CEO of BCI Solutions, a small, family-owned
metal casting foundry located in Bremen, Indiana. The company melts and shapes metal
and sells its products to various agricultural and heavy equipment manufacturers.
Howard Schneider, the veteran Reuters journalist, asked Brown what he thought about officials and media figures
who claim that the U.S. manufacturing sector is thriving. Brown responded bluntly that
every time he hears someone say manufacturing is booming, he screams at the television.
Over the past two and a quarter years, BCI Solutions’ workforce has dropped from 240 employees to 130,
the lowest headcount the family business has seen in more than 30 years.
Meanwhile, the company’s production capacity has fallen to 52%, another level not seen in three decades.
The lowest productivity rate the foundry had ever experienced before was 65%.
This very small example, BCI Solutions, reflects a broader trend of declining employment in U.S. manufacturing.
The decline has continued since Trump imposed tariffs in April 2025,
which he had pledged would increase employment for American workers.
What actually happened on the ground, however, is that job creation in the United States fell by more than 60% last year,
Trump’s first year of his second term, compared to 2024, the final year of Biden’s presidency.
We are talking about an average of around 168,000 jobs per month in 2024, compared to just 49,000 jobs per month in 2025.
In addition, more than 70,000 factory jobs have been lost since April, bringing total manufacturing employment in the United States
down to about 12.7 million by December 2025, the lowest level since March 2022.
Thomas Barkin, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, Virginia, says
the continued decline in hiring data aligns with what he hears in conversations with various companies.
He notes that it is currently difficult to find a company outside the artificial intelligence or healthcare sectors
that is talking about hiring or expanding its workforce.
So why does the situation look like this? Is it just Trump’s tariffs?
Before I answer that important question, let’s take a journey back to the golden age of American industry.
Let’s see how the United States once stood as the fortress of global manufacturing,
and, in doing so, understand how it eventually slid downhill and saw its industrial strength decline.
Stay focused, because this journey matters. And it’s fascinating.
Our story begins with Eli Whitney, the American inventor often called “the father of American technology.”
He became famous for inventing the cotton gin, one of the most important inventions of the 18th century.
At that time, there were essentially two worlds: the world before Eli
Before Eli, enslaved people in America harvested cotton and then manually separated the fibers,
used to make textiles and clothing, from the seeds. It was exhausting, slow, brutally repetitive labor.
Then came the world after Eli, the world in which he invented the cotton gin.
This machine could separate fibers from seeds mechanically, quickly, and efficiently,
in a fraction of the time required by manual labor.
In one hour, the machine could do what many workers could barely accomplish in an entire day.
And because of that, cotton cultivation and the cotton industry in America expanded at an unprecedented scale.
But that’s not the real reason Eli Whitney matters to us. What matters is his role
in spreading the concept of manufacturing machines, tools, and weapons using interchangeable parts.
Whitney spent ten years of his life in court fighting over the theft, imitation, and modification of his cotton gin.
Because the invention did not generate the profits he had expected, he did not hesitate when an opportunity appeared:
a government contract to manufacture and supply weapons.
In 1798, Congress awarded him a contract to produce 10,000 muskets, the standard firearm of the time.
Back then, every musket was made from start to finish as a unique piece, with parts crafted specifically for that individual weapon.
If you ordered 1,000 muskets, each one had to be built with its own custom components. If the trigger on one musket broke,
the entire weapon was essentially useless and would need to be replaced as a whole.
A part from one gun could not simply be fitted into another.
Whitney, with his mechanical mindset, understood the power of designing products with interchangeable parts.
The idea had existed for at least two centuries before him, but no one had implemented it on a large scale.
Faced with the enormous order of 10,000 muskets, he realized that producing them using traditional methods
would take an immense amount of time and skilled labor.
So he manufactured them using standardized, interchangeable components.
His goal was radical for its time: to enable unskilled workers to produce complex products.
Each part would be made by specialized machines, with each machine performing one repetitive task.
The machines themselves would be simple enough for untrained workers to operate.
Instead of crafting one complete musket at a time, production lines would manufacture 10,000 triggers,
10,000 barrels, 10,000 stocks, and then assemble them as needed.
Consider how revolutionary that idea was in the late eighteenth century.
From this model emerged what the world would come to known as “mass production”,
a method that triggered an unprecedented leap in American industry.
It created thousands of jobs for workers who were neither trained nor inclined toward specialized craftsmanship.
By the early twentieth century, the United States had become a global leader in large-scale production lines
built around interchangeable parts.
Then came World War II. At that moment, America discovered the sheer magnitude of its own manufacturing power.
That industrial capacity propelled it to global dominance across multiple sectors.
Take just one example: shipbuilding.
During and after World War II, the United States completely dominated the shipbuilding industry.
It produced thousands of vessels for governments and companies through hundreds of domestic shipyards.
By the end of the war, the U.S. operated between half and two-thirds of the world’s ships.
It possessed around 5,000 cargo ships, in addition to hundreds of warships and tens of thousands of commercial vessels.
Of course, as we all know, that entire picture has flipped 180 degrees in China’s favor. Today, China is the world’s largest
shipbuilder and ship operator, and the United States is nowhere close to competing on that scale.
What matters here is this: the American industrial model that flourished in the mid-twentieth century
was not the natural order of things. It was a historical exception, one that could not be repeated.
That’s the argument of Rachel Slade, a journalist specializing in industrial affairs and author of the well-known book
Making It in America (often translated as “Made in America: The Impossible Mission of Manufacturing in the United States”).
Slade argues that America’s industrial golden age was born out of uniquely rare circumstances,
and those circumstances evaporated with astonishing speed.
One of the most decisive factors was World War II. The United States entered the war and massively benefited
from supplying the Allied nations. By the end of the conflict, it had forced its main industrial rivals,
Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, into surrender.
Other competitors, particularly the British Empire and Fascist Italy, had been severely weakened,
and many of the territories they controlled were on the path to independence.
The result was a global industrial vacuum.
Add to that cheap energy and massive domestic demand,
and American industry boomed from the 1940s through the 1970s. The U.S. economy expanded dramatically. Corporate profits soared.
Factory workers and employees could realistically expect stable, upwardly mobile futures.
Under those conditions, American workers and labor unions felt secure enough to demand higher wages, better benefits,
and meaningful concessions from corporate owners and shareholders, without the constant fear that their jobs
would be outsourced to foreign competitors or cheaper labor markets.
In that golden era, unions were powerful enough to shape public opinion,
influence federal policy, and leave fingerprints on national legislation.
Government backing of organized labor played a direct role in disciplining corporate executives and boards of directors.
A significant portion of corporate profits flowed into workers’ pockets
Executive salaries, for example, were once legally capped. There were limits that prevented CEOs from drifting into
a completely different financial universe while workers stood stranded in another,
watching wealth accumulate above them without restraint.
To grasp the scale of the transformation before we continue this story, consider a few stark numbers.
In 1965, corporate executives in the United States earned roughly 21 times the wage of the average worker.
By 2023, that ratio had exploded to 290 times the average worker’s pay.
Among the 100 largest American companies, the figure reached 603 times the average worker’s salary.
Six hundred and three times. The number is not symbolic. It is literal.
That contrast alone tells you how radically the structure of American capitalism has shifted.
During that golden era, many Americans graduated from high school, joined labor unions,
and secured factory jobs that paid enough to buy a house, get married, raise a large family,
and retire with dignity, much like the Tom Cruise example mentioned earlier in the episode.
This was a robust middle class spending heavily on durable goods, cars, home appliances, machinery. The United States became
the largest consumer of manufactured goods in the world. Many of those goods were innovations born from wartime research,
and most carried the label: “Made in America.”
It was a country that possessed the largest educated workforce on the planet.
Rachel Slade argues that all the defining features of America’s industrial dominance
were the product of temporary, exceptional historical circumstances, not inherent traits of capitalism itself.
And if that’s true, then you cannot simply restore that era by slapping on tariffs
or pressuring the world to buy American goods again.
In other words, history doesn’t rewind on command.
Let’s jump back to the mid-1960s, the real beginning of America’s industrial slide.
The Vietnam War drained the U.S. treasury. As budget deficits grew, inflation rose, and the dollar weakened.
Five years later, in 1971, Richard Nixon effectively abandoned the gold standard.
That decision rang like an alarm bell across the globe. By ending the dollar’s convertibility into gold,
he brought the Bretton Woods Agreement to a close.
The Bretton Woods system, established in 1944, had anchored global exchange rates and trade stability.
Of course, long-time followers of *The Economic Informant* already know the agreement we’ve talked about so many times.
But for our newer audience who might not be familiar with it, this was the international monetary agreement — or conference —
in which the U.S. dollar was pegged to gold. Under it, the United States pledged to buy any amount of dollars from any country,
at any time, if that country chose to do so.
The U.S. dollar was tied to gold at $35 per ounce,
That meant the U.S. had to maintain gold reserves sufficient to back the dollars it issued.
And we actually covered this in a previous episode about Saudi debt in the United States,
where we explained the story of the agreement and the gold standard in detail.
That’s the episode you see here — and if you haven’t watched it yet, it’s definitely worth checking out.
When Nixon ended that convertibility, the dollar became a purely fiat currency, and contributed to a state of economic uncertainty,
 According to Slade, this instability hindered industrial development and began to erode the foundation of the American middle class.
Then came another shock. In 1973, during the October War,
Arab oil-producing nations imposed an oil embargo through OPEC in solidarity with Egypt and Syria. Energy prices quadrupled.
For an industrial economy built on cheap fuel, this was seismic. Manufacturing margins shrank.
The blows did not arrive one at a time. They cascaded.
Vietnam drained public finances. The collapse of Bretton Woods destabilized the monetary system.
The oil shock ended the era of cheap energy. Around the same period, the stock market faltered.
With all those crises unfolding, the next inevitable blow arrived: the return of foreign competition.
During the 1970s and 1980s, Japan, South Korea, and West Germany rebuilt their manufacturing sectors
with fierce determination. They poured massive investments into research and development, modern production systems
Meanwhile, many American industries were drowning in debt and rising costs, wages, pensions, long-term benefit obligations.
Under that pressure, U.S. manufacturing invested far less in research, innovation,
and modernization compared to its global competitors.
Blend all of that together and you get a new corporate mindset: companies prioritizing
shareholder value and executive compensation over workers,
while hesitating to invest heavily in upgrading factories amid global economic volatility.
A middle class with shrinking income security no longer wanted its children working on factory floors.
Instead, families pushed them toward universities and white-collar professions, searching for stability and prestige elsewhere.
It was the inverse of the industrial golden age.
In 1973, the sociologist Daniel Bell published his influential book The Coming of Post-Industrial Society.
In it, he argued that the United States was already transitioning from a goods-producing economy to an idea-driven economy.
Factories were no longer the central engine of growth. Knowledge, services, information, and technology were taking their place.
In early 1993, when U.S. President Bill Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Canada and Mexico,
it sent a very clear message to America’s industrial community:
A message that the loudest voice in the new world would belong to free trade, globalization, and open borders
for imports from anywhere, as long as it was cheaper, while domestic industrial development would take a back seat.
At this point, we arrive at what many consider the worst thing to happen to American industry in the past 25 years:
China, what the world came to call the “China Shock.”
After China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, the world suddenly found itself facing an enormous human force
moving with coordination, equipped with vast manufacturing capacity and low-cost labor,
capacity that kept expanding day after day.
China was not the first industrial competitor to the United States. But America had never before faced competition from a country
that surpassed it so dramatically in population size. As a result, Chinese competition
evolved and escalated at a much faster pace than other competitors, such as Japan.
To grasp the scale of China’s achievement, moving with the mass and power of a herd of elephants
and the speed and agility of a pack of cheetahs, consider this: in 1999, the value of Chinese goods exports
was only one-tenth that of American goods exports.
China’s merchandise exports were even lower than those of a small country like Sweden.
In less than a decade, by 2008, China surpassed the United States for the first time and became the world’s largest exporter of goods.
As a result, American manufacturers, especially producers of low-tech goods such as furniture and small household appliances,
suffered significantly. A state like North Carolina alone lost more than 60,000 furniture manufacturing jobs
to competition from China and Mexico.
At a time when China was sweeping across the world industrially, it’s important to remember that something was also happening
on the American side that reshaped the culture of U.S. industry. That something was called the “Apple Effect.”
In 2012, after Apple became the largest American company by market value,
and with the U.S. being its most profitable market, people took a closer look and realized that it wasn’t manufacturing
any of its products at home. Almost everything was being made in China.
Apple’s model, and its massive success, spread a single question across American companies and manufacturing sectors:
Why don’t we all become like Apple?
Suzanne Berger, the American political scientist at MIT and author of Making in America,
argues that the “Apple Effect” shaped how U.S. companies viewed domestic manufacturing in the years that followed.
The conclusion many firms reached was simple: this is the solution, this is the most profitable model.
High-value industrial activities, advanced technological design, precision industries, and similar fields,
would remain in the United States. But large-scale production lines and lower-tech manufacturing
would be carried out elsewhere, in countries with abundant, lower-cost labor.
The problem with this model, as Berger explains, is that it significantly reduced the rate of innovation in American industry.
Innovation and production are deeply interconnected in any field. When manufacturing disappears from a place,
that country will, more often than not, struggle to sustain industrial innovation.
And that is exactly what happened. The clearest living proof today is China itself.
It transformed from the world’s cheap factory for low-quality goods into a manufacturing powerhouse that no one can easily match,
or even mention in the same breath, without acknowledging its dominance, including the United States.
After securing global manufacturing strength, China didn’t stop there. Over the past 15 years,
it followed almost precisely the American playbook of the 1940s and 1950s, as well as the later models of Germany and Japan.
It poured enormous sums into research and development. One of the most prominent examples is its massive investment
in semiconductor design and manufacturing, an industry it aims to dominate in the future.
All of this brings us to the point we find ourselves at today, the point Donald Trump keeps repeating everywhere.
It forces us to ask the central question: Can Trump bring American industry back to its former greatness?
Whether through tariffs or any other policy?
The short answer: it’s extremely difficult. And even if it were to happen, it would not happen anytime soon,
and most likely not under Trump. Let me explain why
The American economy in its current form, dominated by the service sector in all its branches,
from technology to finance and beyond, is the product of decades of shifting, and at times confused, U.S. policies.
These policies leaned heavily on political weight and military power, the strongest in the world
during those years and up to this very moment.
This is an economy that has lost more than three million manufacturing jobs over the past two decades.
Around 78,000 factories shut down between 2000 and 2014 alone,
and that number has almost certainly risen over the last eleven years.
The share of manufacturing jobs within total private-sector employment fell
from 35 percent in the 1950s to just 9.4 percent today.
It is an economy that, in many ways, stopped seriously accounting for the long-term economic and social costs
of losing manufacturing jobs across different sectors.
Manufacturing brings profound benefits. It equips workers who did not attend university with valuable and practical skills,
skills that shape communities and strengthen the broader social fabric.
Beyond that, manufacturing fuels innovation. It transforms its surrounding environment
into one that attracts research and development. After capital investment, what R&D values most
is quick access to production lines that can turn designs and ideas into real products, test them,
fix their flaws, refine them rapidly, and improve them before mass production and market release.
That is why nearly every American president over the past twenty years, from Obama to Trump,
has pledged to restore America’s industrial strength.
 it is about securing the loyalty of a middle class whose economic footing has been eroding year after year.
But without a doubt, the one who promised this most emphatically was Trump.
He pledged to restore America’s greatness in shipbuilding, automobiles, semiconductors, even in low-tech goods like furniture.
In 2025, the first year of his second term, Trump took steps aimed at turning that sweeping rhetoric into action.
Alongside the tariffs he has been imposing left and right since last April,
he pressured long-standing allies such as Japan and South Korea to strike deals that include commitments
to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in the United States.
Yet Trump himself admitted last December, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal,
that he does not know when all that money will actually begin flowing onto American soil.
Which is only logical, investments of that magnitude take years before their effects even begin to appear, let alone fully mature.
That, of course, assumes those investments continue and do not face setbacks.
At the same time, most economists oppose his expanded use of tariffs.
They argue that the burden of higher prices will fall on companies and consumers alike.
And that will naturally reduce spending on goods and services,
whether those goods are made in America or Mozambique, it won’t matter if they are too expensive.
Tariffs also carry another risk: price increases can erode any gains from higher domestic production or additional government revenue.
Some manufacturers and investors in the industrial sector may benefit from Trump’s tariffs,
but most Americans would bear the cost.
So is there a solution to restore American industry to strength?
In the era we are entering, or have already entered, the era of full automation, “dark factories,”
and relentless technological advancement, solutions do exist. But they are long-term solutions.
One path is massive government investment in the industries of the future, essentially, for America to do exactly what China has done.
In China, for example, if someone wants to establish an advanced manufacturing plant,
the government provides substantial direct support.
Advocates of this approach argue that the United States should follow a similar model.
Another solution is to train young American workers in advanced technological skills,
enabling them to secure jobs in the factories of the future.
That, however, is not simple, especially in a society that is steadily aging,
and whose pre-university education system is not in its strongest condition.
Some experts propose what we might call “indirect reshoring.” What does that mean?
Simply this: instead of launching an all-out trade war in an era where such tactics are less effective,
given deeply interconnected supply chains and a global economic system flexible enough to adapt to punitive and erratic tariffs,
Trump could promote relocating certain industries to neighboring countries, especially Canada and Mexico.
This would allow the United States to keep many critical industries close to home,
while avoiding production costs so high that consumers refuse to buy products labeled “Made in America.”
I know this has been a long discussion. But behind every fact I mentioned today are ten more I left out, in respect of your time.
My aim was to paint a clear picture of American industry, where it once stood and where it stands now,
so that we might learn something from the trajectory.
And I’ll end with a question:
Do you think any Arab country could become a manufacturing powerhouse like China
and achieve a dramatic transformation within twenty or thirty years? Why, or why not?
I’ll be following your thoughts in the comments.
If you liked the episode, please like and share it, and most importantly, subscribe to the channel if you haven’t already,
and tell your friends and loved ones about us so they might benefit.
Bye…