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And more from this week

As you’ve just discovered, your Understanding America schedule is offset by a day this week: the roundup has arrived over the weekend, the commentary will be delivered Tuesday. Hopefully the quiet yearning that these delays prompt deep within your soul will help to further cement your love for—nay, addiction to—these missives.

Your one thing to read this week, from Te-Ping Chen at the Wall Street Journal, is “The High-School Juniors With $70,000-a-Year Job Offers.”

This is the most-forwarded-to-me story in Understanding America history, sent along by an old friend from college, an American Compass member, and a union leader, among others. I think that’s probably because, while the basic facts are nothing new, the quotes and anecdotes signal an ongoing phase-change in the way Americans are thinking about non-college pathways and reindustrialization.

Yes, yes, everyone gets it—welding and plumbing are good jobs, and many people are better served by pursuing them than by taking on debt to struggle through a college program that they fail to complete or else leaves them with few opportunities anyway. Meanwhile, we also need more such workers. Well then good, that ought to solve itself, perhaps with the help of a few speeches and press releases using the term “apprenticeship.”

That the basic fact pattern has not itself solved the problem puzzles a lot of people who have only a vague grasp of how markets work beyond a condescending confidence that they just do. We saw this illustrated recently in discussion over the survey that found 25% of workers believed “I would be better off if I worked in a factory,” even though the manufacturing sector reports many unfilled job openings and employers complain of labor shortages. How could both be true? Or, if both are true, can’t we just introduce the workers to the employers and all will be well?

In reality, as I have been repeating since first noting it in The Once and Future Worker, “people aren’t products.” Any economic analysis that treats a labor market like other markets, or assumes that people are fungible commodities like steel and oil, will fail both morally and empirically. People have limited resources, they are rationally risk averse, they measure success in terms of status as well as dollars. Adjustments take years, to market conditions that can change overnight. Often, the answer to why more young people are not pursuing non-college pathways turns out to be as simple as, “try telling a 18-year-old she doesn’t get to enjoy what American culture has defined as the college experience next year.”

But we’re finally starting to get these things right. This matters for young people:

“Sometimes it’s a little overwhelming—like, this company wants you, that company wants you,” says Rios, who grew up in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Kensington around drug addicts and homelessness, and says he was determined to build a better life for himself. “It honestly feels like I’m an athlete getting all this attention from all these pro teams.”

This matters for employers:

“You got to stop thinking someone else is going to solve your problem,” says Simon, whose former company at times struggled to fill certain roles. “Why don’t you do something about it?”

And a national political culture and economic agenda that commits to building again matters too. In this week’s American Compass podcast, I spoke with Chris Power, the founder and CEO of Hadrian, an advanced manufacturing company. The logic of a “declining industry” is self-reinforcing, he explained. You can’t aggressively offshore manufacturing, declare interest in it “nostalgic,” and then be surprised when banks won’t lend to it and younger workers won’t pursue careers in it. An industry starved of both financial and human capital will in fact decline.

That’s why it’s important to have a president who will say in a commencement speech, as President Trump did last week at the University of Alabama:

I challenge you not merely to use your talents for financial speculation but to apply your great skills that you’ve learned and had to forging the steel and pouring the concrete of new American factories, plants, shipyards, and even cities which are going up all over our country. Don't just build a strong portfolio—build a very, very strong America.

According to the American Enterprise Institute, American men between the ages of 25 and 29 earn less, after adjusting for inflation, than they did 50 years ago. An economy generating that result has failed, per se; no one should expect a nation to support it, or it to support a flourishing nation. As the Journal concludes, quoting Aiden Holland, a senior at Philadelphia’s Father Judge High School, “It feels good knowing we’re very, very much in demand.”

BONUS LINK: Also from the Journal, “How the Highest-Earning Millennials Made It to the Top of Their Generation.” Meet Ryan Haugh, who “grew up in rural Pennsylvania in what he calls ‘a bad Bruce Springsteen song,’ one of five children whose father worked in a factory. His favorite movie was the 1987 hit ‘Wall Street,’ which offered him a road map to financial security: ‘Get a business-oriented college degree, get to the big city.’”

WHAT ELSE SHOULD YOU BE READING?

Rerum Novarum (On Capital and Labor) | Pope Leo XIII

Understanding America’s first papal encyclical! The new Pope Leo, in his address this morning to the College of Cardinals, explained that he chose the name “mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution.” The document is fascinating for its relevance to so many of today’s debates in political economy, and for how much more effectively it anticipates and addresses those debates than much of the leading economics scholarship. It’s admittedly a bit long, but at least check our paragraphs 19–20, 34–37, 43–47, and of course 49:

The most important of all are workingmen's unions, for these virtually include all the rest. History attests what excellent results were brought about by the artificers' guilds of olden times. They were the means of affording not only many advantages to the workmen, but in no small degree of promoting the advancement of art, as numerous monuments remain to bear witness. Such unions should be suited to the requirements of this our age—an age of wider education, of different habits, and of far more numerous requirements in daily life. It is gratifying to know that there are actually in existence not a few associations of this nature, consisting either of workmen alone, or of workmen and employers together, but it were greatly to be desired that they should become more numerous and more efficient. We have spoken of them more than once, yet it will be well to explain here how notably they are needed, to show that they exist of their own right, and what should be their organization and their mode of action.

Labour Faces the Same Fate as the Tories After Reform Surge – Unless It Does Five Things | Lord Maurice Glassman, The Sun

Glassman is a fascinating figure—a member of the UK House of Lords and the founder of “Blue Labour” (in the UK, “Blue” refers to the Right and “Red” to the Left). Here, he excoriates his own party’s leadership for its failure to address the challenges that have driven support for the populism of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party. And then he proposes an agenda that on one hand seems radical, but on the other would probably be a lot more sensible and effective than what the Democratic Party in the United States is working with today. I particularly enjoyed, “To underwrite the industrial strategy half the universities should be turned into vocational colleges linked to the needs of the armed forces and industry. We desperately need a skilled workforce that does not rely on immigration.”

Bonus quote: “London-Kiev must hold the balance of power in Europe against Paris-Berlin. France and Germany are going down the drain. The EU makes action impossible. We are free of all that. We must seize the moment.”

Overlapping Ribbons | Leah Libresco Sargeant, Fairer Disputations

This is a deeply affecting and beautifully written essay about the role of family formation in a life well lived. Sargeant uses the metaphor of an unspooling ribbon, woven together with other parallel ribbons, to describe the way lives are enriched by marriage and raising children. “If you have children,” she writes, “new skeins begin to unspool alongside your paired strands. The present prudence suggests you should be very, very careful to pin the start of the ribbon in just the right spot—after grad school, after some time to travel, after choosing where to live long-term. None of these factors are inappropriate to consider, but there’s something to set against them.”

Huawei the Hydra | Kyle Chan, High Capacity

Good review of House of Huawei, the new book by the Washington Post’s Eva Dou, about the rise of the Chinese technology conglomerate as a fascinating story in its own right and a microcosm of China’s broader strategy of industrial development.

Bonus link: Glenn Luk dives into the sheer scale of Huawei’s engineering talent.

Bonus bonus link: In Building on a Fast Start, FCC Chair Brendan Carr highlights the commission’s work addressing the bizarre problem that 75% of the testing for electronics that require FCC approval is done by labs in China.

AND AT COMMONPLACE

This week Commonplace was focused on themes from the Techno-Industrial Policy Playbook, just published by American Compass in partnership with the Foundation for American Innovation and the Institute for Progress. So check that out too, but be sure in particular to read:

What An Enduring Industrial Policy Requires | Charles Yang

The future of American innovation can’t be vulnerable to the stroke of a president’s pen.

Actually, A Lot of People Do Want to Work in Factories | Parker Sheppard

A new poll written off by critics reveals enormous interest in manufacturing careers.

Tear Down This Paper Wall | Chris Koopman and Josh Smith

To unlock American industrial capacity, we must end NEPA and eliminate its bureaucratic labyrinth.

The Industrial Hollows | Farrell Gregory

British deindustrialization provides a cautionary tale for America.

And as noted above, tied to the Playbook’s release, Chris Power, founder and CEO of Hadrian, joined me on the American Compass Podcast to explain why his company invests in America, how it competes at scale with foreign competitors, and what policymakers can do to help.

Visit commonplace.org, follow us on X @commonplc, and subscribe for regular articles directly in your inbox.

Enjoy the (rest of the) weekend!