If you are as old as me, you might remember the 1950s and 1960s, when America was an industrial juggernaut. Here are a couple pictures from Ford’s giant River Rouge complex, from (I’d guess) the early 1960s:
Now America has de-industrialized. And yet, we somehow managed to increase industrial production from 83.7 in June 2009 to 106.2 at the end of 2014. That’s an increase of 22.5. But 22.5 is just the change in an index number, what does it actually mean? Well in March 1961, soon after JFK took office, America’s industrial production stood at 22.2. That’s right, Obama presided over a boom in industrial production larger than the entire industrial production of the US in March 1961! (And recall that IP is a real index, adjusted for price level changes.)
Misleading? Off course, but still kind of interesting. Note that America’s population has grown since 1961, but it hasn’t even come close to doubling. Meanwhile IP is up nearly 5-fold.
PS. IP peaked at just under 46 in November 1973, generally regarded as the date when the post-WWII industrial boom ended.
Do I believe these numbers? Not really, as I don’t believe the government’s price level numbers. Lots of this “growth” occurred in the 1990s and is just Moore’s Law in computers, not the US actually producing more “stuff.” I don’t consider my current office PC to be 100 times better than my 1990 office PC.