Here are a couple of points that deserve some attention. Posting them here just for starters.
The first is a note on recent growth in the manufacturing sector from a new blog post at The Street Light, a blog that does economic analysis (via Socialist Economics):
Something interesting is happening with this recovery. Actually, it’s something that was also an interesting feature of the Great Recession of 2007-09: the manufacturing sector of the US economy has been performing surprisingly well. In fact, it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to say that manufacturing has been one of the important drivers behind the economic recovery (such as we’ve had) over the past two years. Normally manufacturing output and job growth lag overall economic recoveries in the US. This time manufacturing is leading it.
The following chart shows the change in real GDP and manufacturing production through the last three recessions (1990-91, 2001-02, and 2007-09). In each case manufacturing contracted much more sharply than the economy as a whole. And in the recessions of 1990 and 2001, manufacturing was slower to recover than the economy as a whole, and didn’t really enjoy a period of rapid expansion until well into the recovery in each instance. But this time is different; manufacturing output has actually been growing faster than overall GDP, right out of the gate.
The second piece of data comes from the Apollo Alliance, which made the following observation recently:
While the number of inner-city jobs in the largest U.S. cities has grown by a scant 1% overall during the past decade, new research from Apollo, the Initiative for a Competitive City (ICIC), and Green For All, suggests that inner-city green jobs have grown by 11%, more than 10 times the rate of job growth overall. These preliminary results do not cover the full range of green jobs, but the findings are significant nonetheless. Perhaps most notably, because this level of growth appears to match the level of green economic job growth beyond the inner city, marking a stark departure from decades of metropolitan job growth patterns. Something is going right...
