Manufacturing Workers are Right to Worry More About Outsourcing than Robots

The big difference between outsourcing and robots is that the former is happening and the latter isn't. Productivity growth (a.k.a. robots) has been very slow in recent years. It has averaged less than 1.0 percent over the last seven years and has sometimes been negative.

By contrast, many firms are looking to outsource jobs, both domestically and internationally, on an ongoing basis. For this reason, when the NYT told readers in a story on the jobs report and the economy:

"Perhaps even more...