US politicians like to talk about reviving the industrial heartland. Though America remains a substantial producer of manufactured goods, it ceded top rank in the factory sweepstakes to China in 2010, much to the disgruntlement of workers who once looked to assembly lines for stable well-paying jobs.
美国政界人士喜欢谈论重振工业心脏地带。尽管美国仍是制成品生产大国，但在这条赛道上，它早已在2010年将首位让给中国——令曾经指望靠装配线提供稳定高薪工作的美国工人不满。
Both Donald Trump and Joe Biden unveiled multiple policies to encourage — or coerce — US and multinational companies to build American factories and move production to the US. And for a while it worked, at least partly. Between the start of Trump’s first term in January 2017 and October 2024, private spending on manufacturing construction nearly quadrupled. Employment in the sector rose, and then recovered from a drop during the Covid pandemic to peak at 12.9mn in 2023.
唐纳德•特朗普(Donald Trump)和乔•拜登(Joe Biden)都出台了一系列政策，鼓励——或者胁迫——美国乃至跨国企业在美国建厂，将生产业务转移到美国。这些政策在一段时间内确实奏效，至少有几分作用。从2017年1月特朗普第一个任期开始到2024年10月，私营企业在制造业建筑上的支出接近翻了两番。制造业就业人数有所增长，在新冠疫情期间出现下降，之后又复苏，在2023年达到1290万人的峰值。
But large-scale re-industrialisation is a lot harder than it sounds and the tangible results remain limited. The US imported about $3tn in manufactured goods last year, and manufacturing’s share of American employment currently hovers around 8 per cent, not quite half of where it was in the mid-1980s.
然而，大规模再工业化远比听起来的要困难得多，而且实际成效仍然有限。去年，美国进口了约3万亿美元的制成品，而制造业在美国就业中的占比目前徘徊在8%左右，不到上世纪80年代中期的一半。