One key indicator to answer this question is change in the number of manufacturing jobs. America lost 5.7 million, or 33 percent, of its manufacturing jobs in the 2000s. This is a rate of loss unprecedented in U.S. history"”worse than in the 1980s, when Business Week warned of deindustrialization and worse than the rate of manufacturing job loss experienced during the Great Depression.
While U.S. manufacturing has clawed back, regaining about half a million of those lost manufacturing jobs since 2010, there's little doubt that the 2000s constituted the worst decade for manufacturing employment in the Republic's history.
Moreover, the recovery of manufacturing jobs is actually worse than in most prior recoveries.
