Ep. 331: Gordon Hanson on US Manufacturing Fetishisation, Job Loss, and the Middle Class

Gordon Hanson is the Peter Wertheim Professor in Urban Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and Academic Dean for Strategy and Engagement at Harvard Kennedy School. He is best known for his research on the labour market consequences of globalisation, including pioneering work on the China trade shock. Hanson’s current research addresses the causes and consequences of regional job loss, the effectiveness of place-based policies in alleviating regional economic distress, and how the energy transition will affect local labour markets. This work is part of the Reimagining the Economy project at the Kennedy School, which Hanson co-directs with Dani Rodrik. In this podcast we discuss: 

• America’s historical obsession with manufacturing from the Industrial Revolution to today 
• Manufacturing job losses and their impact on non-college workers 
• How traditional economics fails to measure human flourishing beyond consumption 
• Financial security matters more for lower-income workers than higher earners 
• Non-economic factors like relationships, community, and family are essential to wellbeing 
• AI can now measure hard-to-quantify aspects of wellbeing through text analysis 
• Inadequate support for workers affected by manufacturing decline and China trade shock 
• Community colleges provide career training for workforce retraining 
• Vocational training systems in Mexico, the UK, Germany, and Denmark 
• Denmark as a successful model for worker redeployment and retraining 
• America’s 1,400 community colleges are underfunded despite their potential impact 

You can follow Paul’s work here and here.  

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