Leftovers

A pair of relics from my youth; a package of Empire pencils and a yellow plastic pencil box, also produced by Empire. Both made in the United States.

These days, few pencils are made in the United States and I'd be surprised to find that many pencil boxes are made domestically. Which, to be sure, strikes me as odd. According to the Wikipedia article for Musgrave Pencil Company (which, incidentally, helped Empire set up ship in Shelbyville, Tennessee after the company relocated from New York), most pencils made in the United States are made from American wood that is shipped to China, cut into slats, and then shipped back for final assembly into pencils. Am I the only person who finds it strange that it's apparently less expensive to ship wood across the largest body of water on Earth twice than it is to simply cut it on this side of the Pacific?

I understand that labor costs are much lower in China, but how much direct human labor actually goes into making pencils? Somehow, I'm suspicious of the idea that pencils are hand-cut and painted. And the pencil boxes are also simply rectangular plastic boxes. While I get that it takes a certain level of skill to run modern fabrication machines, again, I wouldn't have guessed that it takes enough direct labor for the lower cost of workers in China to drive the business overseas. But then, I'm not in the manufacturing business.

Still, I understand why people were so receptive to Donald Trump's message that China was cheating at international trade, with the help of unpatriotic businesses. To the layperson, the idea that the American labor isn't productive enough to offset the expense of transoceanic shipping likely seems off. So the idea that the government of China was engaging in subsidies isn't that much of a stretch. I certainly wouldn't be surprised to find that it was true.

But by this point, I think that a lot of it is simply atrophy. Businesses have closed up shop, or sent jobs overseas, and the expertise and equipment to produce these things has simply become scarce. The expense involved in restarting industries that had been allowed to wind down simply doesn't seem worth it. The recent global supply chain shocks might change that line of thinking, but recent history argues strongly against that.

It's easy to become caught up in nostalgia for the age when American manufacturing dominated inexpensive products like pencils and pencil boxes. More difficult is understanding the economics that allowed for that time, and the changes to those economics that resulted in it ending. Political sloganeering and appeals to nationalism are simpler. Which is too bad. Understanding the economics of a resilient economy would be a good idea.