WaPo: “It’s a politically convenient tale for courting voters in key swing states, pining for the way things once were. The problem is that it’s not true — and it is leading to some terrible policy decisions.
A big missing part of the story: Interstate competition. The Rust Belt’s manufacturing decline isn’t primarily about jobs going to Mexico. It’s about jobs going to Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee. To put it in college football terms, the traditional Big Ten has been losing out to the Southeastern Conference. In 1970, the Rust Belt was responsible for nearly half of all manufacturing exports while the South produced less than a quarter. Today, the roles are reversed, it is the Rust Belt that hosts less than one-fourth of all manufactured exports and the South that exports twice what the Rust Belt does.
This migration didn’t happen by accident. It was driven by specific policy choices. States such as Tennessee, Alabama, South Carolina and Texas have aggressively courted manufacturers by promising business-friendly policy environments. You can see this on several different fronts.Economic research suggests that labor conflict drove much of the decline of the Rust Belt. Right-to-work laws in the South, by contrast, created more operational flexibility and attracted capital. The average unionization rate in the Rust Belt is 13.3 percent; in the South, it’s 4.3 percent. Southern states’ political leaders are quite open about how they see right-to-work as foundational to their competitiveness.
But that’s far from the only factor”