This is basically a straight declining line from roughly 1940 to today. It’s mainly productivity and workforce mix. Same exact line can be found for agriculture in the late 19th / early 20th centuries. There’s a tiny acceleration after China joins WTO, but core driver isn’t trade, its productivity.

How did such a huge spike happen on administrative change? Cooking of the books?

You can see where Trump tried, and, uh.

If we’re reshoring manufacturing we have to shore labor. No way around it without automation. Fine, if more the point, but you’ll need higher skilled labor that will likely come from attracting labor from abroad where these industries are developed.

You also have to look at structural changes. For example, a truck driver driving for a manufacturing company is a manufacturing job. But drives the same truck for a service company and it's a service job

did the % of mfg jobs just go up during covid because of retail losing jobs, while factories could stay open?

Yeah

Is this such a bad thing? Our military output at least is increasing, reshoring chip fabs… are we just doing more with less?

That's an aggressive y axis

I'm so old, I remember people decrying the the loss of the small family farm. That didn't reverse the trend.