Talk:Secondary sector of the economy

message: Why has the service sector been included in a page on the secondary sector? This clearly belongs in the Tertiary sector page - or at least it always has as far as I'm concerned
and also who cares ?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.84.143.30 (talk) 11:14, 2 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Manufacturing 

message: Come on, they're hardly Secondary Sector, are they. Ill leave it for a week or so in case anyone here says different before deleting. Midlandstoday (talk) 21:57, 18 December 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Profound. Midlandstoday (talk) 18:02, 27 July 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Creative/telecommunications industries 

message: This is clearly not credible. Where is Japan? 82.110.109.211 (talk) 12:27, 30 June 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Japan 

message: The data for Germany is wrong (hasn't been cleaned up after vandalism, compare with May 2015 page),
and the whole data set is not sourced. 78.52.156.151 (talk) 19:35, 31 October 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Countries by industrial output in 2015 

message: "Manufacturing is an important activity in promoting economic growth and development. Nations that export manufactured products tend to generate higher marginal GDP growth, which supports higher incomes and therefore marginal tax revenue needed to fund such government expenditures as health care and infrastructure. Among developed countries, it is an important source of well-paying jobs for the middle class (e.g., engineering) to facilitate greater social mobility for successive generations on the economy."
For real? This completely flies in the face of what the majority of economists think about manufacturing and exporting. 
Consider this survey which asked economists to agree or disagree with the proposition that "a typical country can increase its citizens' welfare by enacting policies that would increase its trade surplus". Only 5% of economists agreed with this statement (and please read the caveats below).
And since this rather short article is a thinly veiled attack on free trade, it's worth mentioning that 0% of economists disagreed with the proposition that freer trade is better.
Now consider the proposition that "the federal government would make the average U.S. citizen better off by using policies that directly focus more on increasing manufacturing employment than employment in other sectors". Only 5% of economists agreed with this statement. Just over 50% disagreed, and 15% strongly disagreed. Chicago economist Anil Kashyap wrote: "Memo to Romney and Obama: there is nothing per se special about manufacturing (except maybe nostalgia)."
Economist Adam Posen recently wrote about "The Price of Nostalgia" in Foreign Affairs, essentially making the case that the obsession with manufacturing jobs is seriously misguided and that protectionism is snake oil for inequality.
Here's Princeton economist Alan S. Blinder explaining why it's a fallacy to believe that you can export your way to prosperity. This is mercantilist logic.
Whoever wrote this article is very obviously not an economist or someone who understands basic macroeconomic principles. Even the notion that "exported manufactured products support higher incomes" is deeply flawed: while this is true for lower and middle income economies, income growth in more advanced economies leads to a decline in demand for manufactured goods and an increase in demand for services. So an increase in the national income would lead to a natural decline in manufacturing, which has happened in literally every advanced economy. Secondly, the trade deficit (ie, goods and services traded) is just one facet of an accounting assessment known as the current accounts balance, which also tracks the flow of capital. A surplus in goods and services traded does not mean the exporting nation has "more money to spend on welfare and infrastructure", for the simple fact that the money exchanged for an export surplus doesn't stay in the exporter's national economy in the first place; it ends up in the importing nation's economy in the form of capital investment. This entire dynamic is explained by the National Savings and Investment Identity (see here ).
It is foreign direct investment that builds up advanced economies, not manufacturing exports. Both the World Bank and UN classify manufacturing economies as "developing nations", as low and middle income countries tend to be most efficient at manufacturing basic goods. Advanced economies are service oriented (note that by 'service oriented' I don't mean developed countries don't manufacture and export, but rather that services play a disproportionately large role even in the manufacturing process, which is more sophisticated).
This is a serious breach of neutrality guidelines. This entire article should be rewritten more clearly to reflect mainstream economic views and reliably sourced.Jonathan f1 (talk) 08:28, 19 October 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Non-neutrality