For one of the youngest vice-presidential candidates ever nominated, J.D. Vance sounds a little crotchety. His convention speech last week pined for an America that the 39-year-old himself never knew — a land before drugs and deindustrialization ravaged the Rust Belt, when housing was cheap and families were intact, and proud American craftsmen made the world’s best products with their own hands.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong in wishing for things you don’t remember — if they were really good, as many things were during the United States’ manufacturing boom: There were job opportunities, families formed easily and people felt support from society. I have sympathy for Vance’s desire to “put people to work making real products for American families.”
The problem is that Donald Trump cannot bring those days back. And I suspect Vance is too smart to truly believe the former president could.
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It’s not just that economies have become too complicated to take apart and reassemble in some simpler, more desirable form. It’s also that American voters would never stand for it. To see what I mean, consider a talk that Vance gave last February in which he suggested that “economics is fake” — based on his experience owning a 40-year-old refrigerator.
Follow this authorMegan McArdle's opinions“The refrigerator we had,” he told the audience, “you would put lettuce in the icebox and it would be good a month later. … You cannot at any price point buy a refrigerator today that can do that.”
During Vance’s more recent convention speech, the Lettuce Fountain of Youth surfaced on social media to much giggling — because it sums up both the hazy appeal and the implausibility of “Make America Great Again.” Yet there is some truth in Vance’s remark, which is more than a lament for the country’s lost manufacturing might. It’s also a complaint about the way society has become monomaniacally focused on consumer prices, to the detriment of many other things that make our lives better.
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This complaint comes not only from MAGA America but also from left-leaning thinkers such as Lina Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission. It resonates on both the right and left because the government and corporations do pay more attention to prices than to other things that are harder to measure, but no less important. People also care about quality, about having things that last. And they care about their identity as producers, as well as consumers.
Forcing manufacturing workers to compete with lower-wage counterparts elsewhere not only reduced their earning power, but also destabilized their communities, a process that began in the 1960s and ’70s, but accelerated with the “China Shock” of the past 20 years. Many have had to choose between moving for work, sacrificing essential networks of friends and relatives, or staying put and contending with community decline. This has been a real loss.
What’s more, some of the goods they could buy — including, yes, home appliances — did get worse in significant ways. Dishwasher cycles have lengthened into eons, which helps them reduce noise and save water, but wastes our time. Refrigerators come with internet connections but break more frequently (it’s not your imagination). And when an appliance stops working, repairs are so expensive, people often just give up and buy a new one.
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It’s not crazy to want to return to the old ways, or at least try to create options for people who want more expensive but more durable goods, made by Americans living in prosperous manufacturing towns. It’s just impossible. Not just practically, but also politically.
Voters might care about the quality of the goods they buy, but they still care a lot about prices, as our recent bout of inflation has demonstrated. Indeed, this is the reason that Vance looks so likely to become vice president in January.
And prices would have to rise a lot to bring back the fridge economy of yesteryear. The 10-percent, across-the-board tariffs Trump is proposing would be only a down payment.
In 1966, Sears sold customers a 21-cubic-foot capacity, self-defrosting, side-by-side refrigerator for as little as $545. Today, the store’s cheapest equivalent model is more than $1,000. The bigger difference is that, in 1966, the U.S. median family income was $7,500, while in 2022 it was $97,750. If the price of fridges had held constant as a percentage of family income, that new one would cost more than $7,000.
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Now, one can argue that higher relative prices were a good trade-off for supporting a stable manufacturing sector that provided high-paying jobs to men with no education beyond high school. Those workers had the satisfaction of making tangible products and also the wherewithal to create stable families, buy homes and grab a piece of the American Dream. J.D. Vance is a smart guy, and I’m not sure I’d win that debate with him.
But I don’t think he is smart enough to win his argument with a voter who just walked into Sears and discovered that new appliances suddenly cost seven times what they used to.
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