“Jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country,” President Donald Trump promised on “Liberation Day,” as he announced tariffs that have shocked global markets and set the country on course for a recession. “We will supercharge our domestic industrial base. We will pry open foreign markets and break down foreign trade barriers and ultimately, more production at home will mean stronger competition and lower prices for consumers.”

This has long been the key argument behind protectionist policies like Trump’s: they will bring manufacturing jobs back to America. It’s a claim popular not just on the right, but with pro-tariff Democrats and labor unions, too. Chris Deluzio, a House Democrat from western Pennsylvania (a traditional hotbed of protectionism) has urged his party to “embrace tariffs as one component of a broader industrial strategy to revitalize American manufacturing and make whole communities that have been hollowed out by decades of bad trade policy.”

It’s a false promise. Tariffs cannot “make whole” any communities that have seen manufacturing jobs depart. That’s partly because tariffs are wildly ineffective at that purpose, as we saw in Trump’s first term, when his tariffs failed to lead to any increase in manufacturing employment, while costing jobs elsewhere.

But the bigger reason is that the fall of manufacturing employment in the US was not caused primarily by changes in policy, and changes in policy cannot reverse it. What’s happening is a transition from manufacturing to services that occurs in all countries as they get richer.

This transition happened in countries whose policies were strongly biased toward manufacturing, like Germany, just as it did in the US.

The root cause isn’t trade negotiators selling out the working class, but the inevitable effects of rising productivity in the manufacturing sector, plus falling demand for many manufactured goods.

Indeed, manufacturing employment isn’t just falling in the US: it’s falling worldwide. That’s the essential reality that Trump, Deluzio, and other tariff-mongers refuse to understand.

Rich countries see manufacturing employment fall

For over a century, economists have observed that as national economies grow, the workforce’s composition changes. Most commonly, the economy is broken down into three broad sectors:

• Primary, which includes agriculture, fishing, and forestry;
• Secondary, which includes manufacturing and construction;
• Tertiary, which includes the services sector.

There isn’t universal agreement on the dividing lines between these; I’ve seen mining put both in primary (because it’s taking value directly from the earth, much like forestry or farming) and in secondary (because it requires advanced machinery, like manufacturing). But the broad distinction is between agriculture, manufacturing, and services.

In a recent paper,........

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