New Orleans        Sometimes you just have to scratch your head and wonder what’s happening when it doesn’t add up to expectations and usual information.  I had that feeling as I read several things about the economy recently.

On one hand, contrary to a lot of talk from the White House, the US has lost 100,000 manufacturing jobs, signally a continued retreat, rather than any kind of revival. On the other hand, manufacturing productivity increased and manufacturing shipments bumped up over 4%.  Is this a speedup?  Are factories working smarter?  Is this the oft promoted first sign of an advantage from artificial intelligence, robots, or what?

A long op-ed in the Times was also as fascinating, as it was confounding.  Among the data points as the reporter looked at the situation while taking a deep dive in Hickory, North Carolina, a former furniture center, were these…

• Economists looking at the China shock to the US economy now calculate that the job growth in areas hurt by Chinese competition has outpaced growth in areas less affected. This growth can be attributed mostly to the sharp rise in service industry employment.
• Since 2017, median household income in the hardest-hit regions has grown faster than the national average, Moody’s calculates, after years of lagging behind. The rate of people moving in to these regions has also increased.
• The extensive water and sewer systems required for the textile and furniture industries helped persuade Apple, Microsoft and Google to build thirsty data centers in the area.
• The service jobs that replaced factory ones pay less, and that’s generally true in Hickory, where production jobs pay an average of $22.15, compared with $17.60 for health care support. But that beats the decline of the prior two decades.

All of this contradicts what has been the common narrative and explanation.  None of this is due to Trump policies or his tariffs.  Workers have aged and benefit systems are holding them in place.  Communities are investing in amenities in downtown development, educational opportunity, and amenities for young families and workers, while adding jobs mainly in the service section, particularly health care.

If Hickory is a canary in the coal mine rather than an outlier, the fact that “After falling for nearly 20 years, the number of people ages 18 to 39 has been rising in the Hickory area since 2017” is a strong heartbeat of recovery.  The other key factor has been the migration of immigrant workers into the community.  The Hispanic population of the Hickory area is now over 10%.  Of course, the Trump deportation and anti-immigration programs are hurting this part of the community and threatening its revival.

What about Trump’s drumbeating for tariffs?  Most furniture manufacturers were burned when they exported work to China, now finding they were in fact training the Chinese to take over their jobs and market.  Some of the survivors, who switched to high-end goods, when they couldn’t compete with imports, aren’t finding tariffs helpful, saying…

[his] company’s tariff bill is more than 10 times what it was before Trump took office, and the president’s on-again, off-again tariff decisions chew up hundreds of hours of executive time calculating how much to increase prices.

There seem to be a lot of lessons here, way above my job grade, but rather than the kneejerk administration policies, maybe they should be scratching their heads, like I am, and looking at Hickory and the other statistics as the direction to move for different and better policies and programs, including maintaining benefits, support for urban development,  healthcare, and retraining investments, among other things.