landmark cases volume two. the book costs $8.95 plus shipping and handling. to get your copy go to c-span.org/landmark cases. c-span where history unfolds daily. in 1979, c-span was created as a public service by america's cable television companies and brought to you by your cable or satellite provider. next, discussion of a new study that examines the decline in manufacturing jobs. economists address various factors, including trade and outsourcing. as well as trends in capital manufacturing. this hour and a half hosted by the economic policy institute in washington d.c.

>> good morning everybody and welcome to the economic policy institute. thanks for joining us today. delighted to kick off the new hour and important and provocative panel on manufacturing employment. and we've invited susan house mann vice president to present her manufacturing and employment data. and this debate is not new. in fact, larry michelle from the economic policy former president and now distinguished fellow raised similar concerns back in 1989. but this debate has raged and it has been an important under ping of policy debates that have to do with trade and automation and how we address issues or concerns around the manufacturing sector, the health of the manufacturing sector, and what policies might be needed. so i'm going to introduce the entire panel right now let's

susan present her research, and we have carolyn friend to comment. and from university had hoped to join us here today but was presented from weather for traveling. so larry michelle will read his prepared remark. so susan houseman is the vice president of employment research and recognized expert on temporary health employment as well as manufacturing employment in which she's done a lot of research. delighted to be joined by carolyn friend from the car line institute. car line has been a senior fellow at the peterson institute since may 2013 but currently on leave for public service as director of investment climate at the world bank. so delighted she could make time to join us today and pleased to have her. and as i said michael hicks

director of fall state university unable to join us but we hope to have ongoing dialogue with professor hicks in the posse vent blogs that we will have. and, finally, we are delighted to have our own josh bivens research director to also overcome tarry. this is an area that josh has spent a lot of time and research looking into. and so without further adieu, i'll have sue hasan houseman prt her research. please welcome susan. >> thank you very much. and also larry for organizing this forum. and inviting me to come. all right. i think i'm all set.

so topic of today of our forum is understanding the precipitous and unprecedented historically decline of u.s. manufacturing in the year 2,000. this chart that i'm going to is that right with today, blue line shows manufacturing employment. the light gray line shows factories, number of establishments in manufacturing of the since the late 1940s to present. and what you can see is that manufacturing employment rose steadily with some fluctuations around the business cycle until the late 1970s when it took a significant drop in 1980s those job laws concentrated in steel and textiles. after that, it was quite stable for a long period of time. and then end of late '90s, 2,000, collapsed.

we saw short period of time 2,000 to 2007 drop in manufacturing employment of 20%. for the first time ever manufacturing employment did not recover from the recession. just kept going down. it took another big hit in the great recession. and today it spans nearly 5 million jobs lower than it was at business cycle peak in 2,000. and almost 30% decline. there was a parallel decline in the number of factories operating in the united states over this period by about 20%. so this, as thee amentioned cause d debate about what it was. a lot of what i'll spend my talk on is what i view as a widespre widespread misinterpretation of basic data that led us in the wrong direction.

and i'll quickly review some of the research. so this chart shows manufacturing share of private industry employment and gdp. against since late '40s. and what you can see that's been rather declining rather steadily. and manufacturing's output share in the private sector has been trending downward pretty much along with employment. this picture portrays sector that has not been particularly strong in the united states for a long time. but somewhat paradoxically if you look at real growth, that's inflation adjusted, that's the bottom graph, what you see is that manufacturing real output growth, has been more or less keeping pace with that in the private sector.

so how do we reconcile this paradox? prevailing view is the following. this graph puts those two charts together. big x. one going in one way. on the one share is declining. on the other hand, it's been more or less keeping output growth inflation adjusted has been keeping pace with lt private sector. that in the private sector. well, it has to be the case that prices of domestic manufactured goods have been following relative to services prices. that sort of drops out of that. secondly, productivity growth is much higher. flou, productivity growth per se doesn't cause employment, relative employment declines. can't explain that share. so you need something else. and this is where the story, the prevailing view is quite important. it says consumer demands for

manufacture product has been limited. even though the relative prices has been dropping, consumers hasn't been going in and buying enough more to pop it up. and, therefore, its share of both employment and output have been falling. so the prevailing view, what i'm going to say kind of in conclusion, is that rapid productivity growth explains the decline in employment share. rapid productivity growth in particular in the form of automation. if you are not so inclined, you can skip this equation. but basically what it says, there is little counting identity going on here. that we define productivity as output per worker and labor hour. and it falls out that the difference in the rates of growth of employment in manufacturing versus the economy overall just equal the

differences in the rates of outgrow outgrowth. well, if it's been the same versus the over all economy, tha than productivity accounts for all of that. and these accounting identities, you can't take these as inferences based on these, nonetheless, the descriptive evidence seems pretty compelling. and the conclusion has been that p productivity is drawing automation and that has been drawing the downward trend in employment overall. this conclusion is often repeated as fact in mainstream media. here is a quote from "the new

york times" by reporter apple palm. from economic perspective, there can be no revival of american manufacturing because there has been no collapse because of automation there are far fewer factory jobs. but the value of stuff made in america reached a record high in the first quarter of 2016 after adjusting for inflation. so i'm calling that correct reconciliation of these apparently disparate trends is measurement issue. please bear with me. so it turns out that one industry, computer and electronic products, drives manufacturing's falling relative prices, robust output growth and extraordinarily productivity growth. yet the computer industry counts for less than 15% of manufacturing gdp. so how can this happen? well, the out sized effect, this is one relatively small industry

has on the aggregate manufacturing numbers reflects statistical adjustment for computers anselmty conductor price deflators to reflect the dramatic improvements in product quality. extraordinarily productivity growth in turn in computers, and by extension what we are seeing in the aggregate manufacturing numbers are just picking up basically product improvements. they have very little to do with automati automation per se. now i want to be clear there is it a consensus that this should adjust for product quality. the problem, my problem is more with that it really rends ends dominating the statistics and gives misleading what's going on in the sector and basically supports a narrative that i this

think is not warranted. so let's run through and see how this kind of plays out. here are prices. remember, prices in manufacturing have to be rising less quickly than they are in the aggregate sector. this shows published numbers. indeed they indeed they are. particularly after the late 1970s. but if you take out computers, okay, that's that lower graph, i show in red, the prices for computer and electronic sectors, that was rising until the 1960s and started falling and plummeting. actually falling, falling very rapidly beginning in the 1980s and 1990s. so when you take that out, which are those other two lines, price for manufacturing and for private sector overall, you can

see that those price trends are more or less very, very similar. relative prices in manufacturing aren't really falling relative to the rest of the economy. here is the real growth in index of real growth in manufacturing versus the private industry. the graph that i showed you earlier. here's what happens when you take out computers from both private industry and from manufacturing. manufacturing gdp growth is between 1979 and 2,000, which is just less than half, 45% of the overall private sector growth. since 2,000, it's been 12%. manufacturing output in 2016, without computers was less than it was in 2007. nearly a decade later.

now, this graph shows plots. the computer industry index of that. private sector growth and manufacturing all together. there a there are three lines on this graph. but the other two show up as horizontal lines along the x axis. growth in this industry is different order of magnitude from everything else, that's why it skews the statistics. interestingly, and ironically, despite the robust growth in this industry, domestic manufacturing of computer and electronic products has been losing competitiveness as my coauthors document in a paper using proprietary data, the sort of capacity has been rapidly shifting to asia, even as it's been driving this robust

economy. so another interesting thing to note is that while it is the case the domestic real consumption of manufactured products prior to 2,000 was less of the growth rate was less than for services, that's not been the case since 2,000. it's actually been goirowing faster and that's been consistent with low cost exports increasing demand in this country. finally, let's think about productivity growth. productivity growth without computers is not much higher or only somewhat higher than that in private industry. very nice paper by martin bailey and bose worth written a few years ago once you took out the computers from 1987 to 2011

period part of the productivity growth was the same in manufacturing as in private industry. now, look around, if the productivity is the same for most of manufacturing as it is for the private sector, then it can account for none of the relative employment declines. i do want to say that i've done alternative calculations with different data. and i find it doesn't -- productivity is not the same, but it doesn't count for the slower output growth does again in this accounting sense make up most or account for most of the relative employment declines. the point, though, that i want to make is that there is just no prima fascia evidence for the productivity growth that it

caused employment declines in manufacturing. understanding the causes of what was going on really requires a good look at why output growth for most manufacturing was just plain slower, a lot slower than it has been in the private sector over all. and i'm not going to weigh in on that per se, but before i move on to some research evidence on that topic, i think it's useful to just pause and take a look and think about what productivity measures. another criticism that i have of much of the discussion that takes place over automation is that automation, productivity growth is often with automation, it's assumed that. it measures many different things, including automation. we have already seen, for

example, the product improvements in computers and semi conductors caused tremendous productivity growth in that industry. and by extension in the aggregate manufacturing statistics. that's not automation. okay. also, one often sees a rapid increase in productivity during major periods of restructuring as we saw in the early 2000s. that isn't necessarily an automation of what's going on. in fact, one would expect, for example, on account of increased imports, international pressure from manufacturers in other countries, there was a decline in the number of factories, the first thing that would be pushed out is the most labor intensive, and that will result in

mechanical increase, measured productivity growth. so in international trade can actually cause competition, can cause sort of a sorting out of what's made, change in the production, and lead to increased productivity. another thing that can be happening is that with kind of globalization, the stages of production that occur here in the united states can just be changing. and the paper that i wrote for this i ga this, i gave some nice case examples from thomas homes, home furniture industry. many was decimated in the early 2000s, many went out of business. and what remained much of what was produced here was

fundamentally altered. in the cut and sewing aspects was put out to china. it doesn't have to do tw automation per sae. it's also been found that international competition may spur investments in automation. and in that case, kind of the direction of causality is a little unclear, because the competition from overseas can spur manufacturers in this country to increase investments and automate faster than they might have already done so. so the bottom line is this, that productivity growth does not per se cause employment declines. the strong argument that automation is primarily responsible for employment

declines and relative, both relative and absolute employment declines, is largely based on descriptive evidence. and to really understand what's going on, we need to look at research evidence. that's what i'm going to very briefly turn to now. there has been a significant and growing body of literature that, in particular, has focused on what's happened with the precipitous decline in employment since the 2000s. exchange rates, corporate taxes, tariffs, and the like can all effect the relative competitiveness of manufacturing in the united states. and globalization may reduce domestic manufacturing output growth through imports and a lot of the focus has been on sort of looking at the growth of

imports, particularly from china. but we should also remember it can also operate through slow export growth in exports. companies may choose to close factories in the united states and move them to mexico or to ireland or somewhere else. or they may just choose to expand their production overseas. much of what multinational companies, when they manufacture overseas, they often are manufacturing primarily for export markets. some of that may come back to the united states, but by no means all of that. and i mention that because we don't capture that dynamic very well in the statistics. so it can be a bit hard to study. before i sort of say a few words about the research literature, i really want to emphasize that no single study captures all aspects of globalization and

effects on manufacturing employment. there is weaknesses and big holes in the literature. there probably always will be. but collectively the research findings point to large adverse effects operating through variety of mechanisms. one of the most cited studies says about 25% of the decline m informing employment can be attributed to the growth of imports from china. a completely different study using a different data and methodology looks specifically at changes in trade policy after 200 causing increase in imports from china and also finds very large adverse employment effects. interestingly, the sets of authors on these papers have recently looked at the impact on

imports from china and on other things, and have concluded they have led to declines in production, investment, and patent activity in the united states. which can of course over time have spill over effects on employment. the finalal study that i'll highlight, and there are others that i'm not going to cover, i don't have time, looks actually at appreciation of the dollar. a large appreciation of the dollar in the early 2000s on the manufacturing employment and can accoun account, depending on specification, it can account for half or more of the decline in manufacturing employment. the reason i like this paper and think it's important, it's not just looking at chinese imports, it effectively is capturing imports and exports, the effect of this exchange rate appreciation on both.

one elevate very interesting findings from this paper also is that the job losses from temporary exchange rate appreciation tend to be permanent. that is if an exchange rate appreciation induces firms to invest overseas, whatever, you have some cost investments. and when the dollar returns to its original level, it's not necessarily going to be the case that those jobs will come back. okay. so it's a different -- often you hear the story the jobs aren't coming back because of aut maigts mag automation. wi there is another dynamic too. once you lose it it's hard to get it back. oftentimes, we want to say that, well, if this particular study

explains a quarter of the decline in manufacturing employment, three quarters is explained by automation. but that doesn't follow. okay. and it turns out that several studies have tried to look specifically in the 2000s at the effect of automation specifically investments in it technology on productivity and employment declines and have found none. one is by others in a sort of companion paper to their china paper look at industries at increased competition from china and led to significant employment declines. but also in parallel look at industries susceptible of computers, while it led to change of composition but no

employment declines. in a much publicized working paper that came out last year by upholn, they found they have the potential to cause large dislocations to workers. but that's in the future. so far, the number of industrial robots have invested in can account for no more than trivial share of the employment decline in manufacturing. ap tand then finally i'll mentin what i think is related literature. rise of markups since the 19d 90s and off shoring of labor intensive processes account for pt rise of capital's share in the economy, in the decline of labor share in the economy. and in other words it's not

capital investment per se. it's other things, off shoring. and that sort of stylized fact is consistent with large technology shock causing the employment declines in capital share. let me close with a few thoughts on sort of why manufacturing matters. people sometimes think well manufacturing employment is now under 10% of the economy. we shouldn't worry about it so much. but there has been a lot of domest domestic outsourcing. half or more of the employment used in manufacturing of products actually is employed outside the manufacturing sector. also it has very large spillover effects on local and national economies. so you have typically multipliers of manufacturing employment, orders of magnitude of two or more.

and one of the most robust findings in the economic literature is plant closures and mass layoffs have large adverse lasting effects on workers in communities. okay. workers on average experience large and very persistent cross decades earnings losses on average, some do fine, but many don't. and the size of the shop matters. large adverse shops can send regional economies into ha downward spiral and depress regions for decades. we've known this for a very long time. and it's been documented in a better way recently in the literature. and the collapse of manufacturing employment, while not the only factor behind the labor markets in the united states, in 2000s has certainly contributed to employment, declines in employment rates

especially among less educated men and women. now, we have a relatively low unemployment rate today. but we still see in the form of very weak earnings growth and very low labor force participation rates among less educated, sort of greater structural problems in the economy, that at least in some way are related to the decline of manufacturing employment. and there has been evidence on that. okay. also, as i mention the loss of manufacturing production has led to the loss of research and development, which has longer term implications for the health of the u.s. economy. so to conclude, my main point is

claims of automation cause this in manufacturing employment is not supported by the evidence. i'm not saying it played no role. certainly automation does, but no prima fascia evidence nor is there evidence for 2000s big surge in automation was the primary cause of what we've been seeing. studies do find, they played a significant role, in manufacturing employment declines in the 2000s but again i want to emphasize research is incomplete. big holes in the data. foreign competition does spur some investments in automation, and here the direction of cast allstate causality is ambiguous. and it has been decline in u.s.

manufacturing employment in 2000s has had adverse effect. but this raises questions about policies that may have triggered the sudden shift in global structure of production. i am guessing that carolyn and josh will weigh in on it, but thank you very much. [ applause ] >> thank you so much to dr. susan houseman from up john institute. now we would like to welcome carolyn from the world bank. we'll ask each of them to stick to about seven months. >> thanks. it's my ple it's my pressure to be here. let me see if i can get my power point on to the screen.

is someone doing it from there? oh, okay. it's this one. put it into view. so, you know, let me start by saying i agree with most of what susan said. and i think she gave a really nice presentation. i think i'm going to quibble about the size of automation and skill bias technological change and demand shifts and things like that versus trade. but i do agree that especially in the 2000s increased imports,

you know, especially from china played a role in the decline in u.s. manufacturing. i do want to take a step back and just remember why we like to trade. because when you just focus on manufacturing, you can ignore that part of it. the main reason is that actually there are consumer gains. so consumers gain when you go to the store and prices are lower. that's real gain for income people. and especially for people who are the most vulnerable, the poorest people who spend a really large share of their income on goods. so i don't think we should forget about that when we talked about this, because while there are the workers in the manufacturing sector, they are also all the people who work in the service sector, actually the majority of americans, who are benefiting enormously from this. and especially some of the

poorest. and if we do want to think about the loss in jobs from manufacturing h the right policies are probably about training, adjustment, et cetera, as opposed to restricting trade. and then, finally, this was a really special period. it was appear period when china running a surplus at 10% at some point. and the u.s. was having a big consumption boom. so i think we have to take macro policies into consideration that in some sense we drove this ourselves, not to do with trade policies, but to do with our policies that discouraged savings, primarily. and then, finally, in terms of just a broad overview, let's also not forget that 500 million people were lifted out of poverty in china from the early

'80s, since the early '80s since 2010. and part of that was part of productivity and reforms there and trade. and that's another bonus of global integration that we don't want to forget about. and some would also argue that integration, talking with other countries, business links, et cetera, have supported a long period of peace. to just to think about those as an overview. in terms of the quibbles with this paper, one is, i think, demand matters a lot. and it has to do with the size of the economy. and i'm going to go back to this kind of relative productivity hypothesis that susan talked about that productivity of manufacturers increases. but how many tvs can you have?

how many cars can you buy? and that's going to put a constraint demand a shifting towards services as countries get richer. so we just can't expect jobs to be coming from there. i also have a quibble that i, and i've seen this before, it's been a common thread in this literature, of let's take out the computer sector and show no where else. well, if we can take out one sector, we should take out other sectors too. because now we are waving it towards the lowest productivity growth since we are taking high productivity growth one. and i'm going to show you data that would matter as well. and finally i'm going to talk about just some other things like macro context, and other nitpicks one could have with the data besides the computer price index. so, first, this is the alternative picture that people show instead of looking at the number of manufacturing jobs,

let's look at the share in employment. and there this period of rapid decline is not there. so it's been kind of a steady decline in manufacturing employment. and the difference has to do with the fact that during the early period, when manufacturing growth was stable, so the left pictures, pretty much the same picture that susan had, where you do see the precipitous decline in manufacturing employment, part of it was because productivity was increasing, but demand was, too, as workers were coming on the labor force, over all income was going up tasas a result of that and demand, as well as being plenty of workers to hire. in this later period, if you look at the working age population, it was much more stagnant. so the manufacturing sector is

competing with other sectors for employment much more just, you know, which makes it more difficult to maintain employment. and also there is less of a demand boost for all those goods that they are producing. and here is what the technology looks like. and i just put a few sectors here just to give the idea. if we take out computers of some other sectors, actually, if computers were on this chart on the left of labor pro du productivity it would be way off the scale, it would be 11, so it would be lower so you would get the flat lines that susan showed that computers dominate. but there is a difference within some of these other sectors. and what you really see is even primary metals, machinery,

transport equipment, et cetera, had much higher productivity growth than our services, than hotel and food services, truck transportation. oh, wow, i have one minute. so let me just quickly go through the rest. and you can see it in prices as well. that the prices have fallen much more for goods than for services. so that's where the consumer gains come in. but also this leads to a shift, in part, because of this demand for services, the prices are rising there. but the share of what people are spending, as countries get richer they spend lesson goods. and because prices are falling, you spend lesson goods. and you can see this very clearly in this shift towards

consumption of services. this is wherein in this pictur you can see, again i'm trying to distinguish between industries f you want to take out electronics and computer, you should probably take out a parallel on the other side something of equal size. so the size of the bubbles are the size of the sectors and shows the employment change, which is kind of exaggerated here because of the scale versus the output change. they both are going to roughly .8. but the point being that, one, all sectors experienced decline in employment. it wasn't specific to the declining sectors because productivity was rising, in part. in some sectors where output and

employment declined it was probably more related to trade, i'll concede that. but we also saw really big productivity gains, especially in transportation equipment. and i think that should be recognized. it's a huge sector that had a big productivity increase. not as big as computers, but big. and, finally, the other issues that i wanted to talk about, one, and i said it at the beginning, the macro context matters a lot. unemployment was very low. consumption share of gdp was increasing. if you look at imports to gdp, looks very much like other countries over this period. what's really different is exports to gdp. so something was wrong in the u.s. that as competition was

affecting our manufacturing industry, we weren't growing our exports in the same way as other countries. and, finally, if we are going to nitpick the data and just take out one sector and say look, then there are other nitpicks as well. transfer pricing and profit shifting matter a lot. there is incentives out there to over invoice imports, company or imported inputs which then pull your profits down and your taxes down. and to under invoice exports. and some have estimated this alone is half of the u.s. trade deficit. and then the price index on autos and machinery probably understates advances.

i least a ce a car. so there is something going on that if we are going to argue about the price index on computers, then we should probably look into some of these other price indexes that may understate real increases. and i'll wrap up there because i think it's time. thank you. [ applause ] >> thank you very much, carolyn. >> and next we'll hear from dr. josh bivens from the economic policy institute. >> sorry, i'm going to try to find my power point. there we go. okay. thank you. so i'm going to say a couple words. i'll start by saying i think

susan's paper and presentation are really thought provoking and careful in their claims about what economic analysis can precisely say about the various facets of globalization and manufacturing job loss. so i'm going to take my job to be a little vest careful. and basically say it's true we can't be super precise about this. but we can look at some sort of broad brush data and try to bracket the effect of rising trade deficits on manufacturing employment and it's going to be really hard to escape the conclusion those effects are pretty large. so before getting to the presees question at hand, i also have two quick a sides. first one, the extent of globalization pressure on the living standards of american workers is not equal to its effect on manufacturing employment. we can have balance trade and there might still be large downward wage pressure on noncollege wages in the u.s. economy. and in fact i think these wage effects cumulatively are quite a bit larger in terms of losses they put on american workers than damage done by

manufacturing job displacement. i think the manufacturing displacement, they are the most acute damage felt by individual workers for sure. it is much worse to completely lose your job than to have your wage sort of pushed down effects are really big. that's one aside. second aside, trade deficits can certainly have effects on overall employment, not just manufacturing employment, particularly when the economy's growth rate is demand constrained. i mean, yes, when the economy is unambiguously full of employment, trade deficits change the composition of employment pushing jobs out of tradeable sectors in non tradeable. we have not been in an unambiguous full economy for a long, long time. graph i'm showing you here is interest rates and if you concentrate on the far right of that graph we've had interest rates essentially bumping right above zero for about a decade. in the standard story for how trade deficits do not harm overall employment is, yes, the trade deficit reduces employment

all else equal, but you get this big inflow of capital that pushes down interest rates and that creates job pushes down. capital inflows push down interest rates. >> okay. >> we do not need lower interest rates in the u.s. economy for job growth, we need something else because we've had zero interest rates for essentially a decade. i would argue the counter veiling effect of pushing up jobs over the past decade has been extraordinarily week. trade deficits can have impacts on overall employment not just manufacturing. and finally this is boring but it's worth saying. if we're going to tolerate a really large trade deficit and we want to be at full employment, then we have to tolerate a really large budget deaf fit or indebted household sector. there's no getting around that fact. someone who wants to say we're at full employment and we have a large trade deficit and that's fine, i don't want to hear them

talking about how we need to reduce the budget deficit. unless you think there's a one-way causality from budget deficit to trade, but there's not. so let's get to the real question at hand. trade deficits and manufacturing job loss, this i realize is just exactly the same graph that susan put in hers in the is, to me, looking at the right, it's the implosion post 2000 that, to me, is the interesting thing here. it's one thing to say manufacturing's employment share has gone down for a long time. it has. the overall level was extraordinarily stable for about 35 years, between anyone teen 65 and 2000 and then it falls off a cliff. and, again, my contribution to sort of dismissing the really easy it was all automation explanation for this, if you look at productivity growth between 1960 phi and 2000 when manufacturing employment was really stable and you look at

that time post 2000 when it's not stable at all, it's hard to see much difference there. productivity growth was fast in manufacturing from 65 to 2000 and we did not lose 33% of the jobs in a 16-year period. and so basically there's a second column is basically hours, that's employment in the industry, that's the annual loss over that time period. so the way i match up these two things, i think at best a quote unquote acceleration of productivity of 0.2% in the latter period maybe it gets you 10% of the explanation of what happened post 2000. i think that's actually even a little high. so, can we be more precise than this? if we don't think it's productivity what can we say that it is? and i in the interest of meeting my seven minutes will skip one slide. focus on the bottom expression here. i'll tell what you that means in one second. but the logic is going to be the changes in manufacturing employment are basically just equal to the change in domestic output, how much stuff factories in the united states are

produce, minus the change in productivity. so if you produce 4% more stuff but productivity rises by 4% employment doesn't change at all. you didn't need to hire anyone else to produce that 4%, your existing workforce just got more efficient. one thing we often miss is the change in output is a function of two things, a lot of things but two things. domestic demand, what do you u.s. consumers actually want to buy from the manufacturing sector? and then the wedge, the trade deficits introduce between that domestic demand and domestic output. so maybe u.s. consumers want to buy a trillion dollars worth of manufacturing output in a given year but on net 200 billion of that is satisfied by imports you're going to see a wedge of what they buy and what is produced by u.s. factories. so that's whoa i'm trying to get at with this last expression with the little hats over it. that l with the hat over it that's employment in manufacturing and that's going to equal the growth of domestic demand, that's that yd with the hat. plus, the change in the wealth introduced by the trade deficit, that's that little "d."

and then minus productivity growth over that time period in the will let us do a very simple accounting decomposition. first thing i want to convince that you little "d," the wedge that the trade deficit puts between what u.s. consumers demand from manufacturing output and what producers actually produce, it's pretty big. this, the sort of blue area is output, real output in u.s. manufacturing and then the red is domestic demand. i'm defining domestic demand as basically just output plus manufacturing imports minus manufacturing exports. so it is the manufacturing goods demand that sticks in the united states. i'm taking out exports because that's foreign, but i'm adding the imports in. so this is the wedge that rising trade deficits are putting between output, between demand and output. and you can see it started to become big and it's grown significantly over the past couple of decades. and so if you just take that expression from before that had

employment as a function of domestic demand, the wedge between output and demand and productivity, you can actually get some numbers. and the numbers i looked at are between 1997 and 2016 for a couple of reasons. choosing these years, one, actually 1998 is the manufacturing employment peak in the u.s. economy. that's pretty striking because 1997 and 2000 the u.s. economy was roaring. it rose by 10%. that's an extraordinarily fast growth rate yet manufacturing employment declines. what's going on there in 1997? it's the asian currency crisis. we see trade deficits develop because of what's happening elsewhere in the world and that's one reason to choose 1997, because that's when i would argue our modern era of large trade deficits begins. and then, two, data's much easier from 97 in these series so that's why i chose it. if you look at ours, basically people have shown this before

were we see about a 34% decline in employment hours and manufacturing. over the same period, we actually have domestic demand rising by 34% over this time period. there was actually relatively robust demand growth in that time. but the wedge between demand and output, that trade balance wedge, that knocks about 18 percentage points as a shafer manufacturing output off of that. so that's domestic demand, u.s. consumers wanting to buy washing machines and dining room tables and tvs but it's not being satisfied by domestic production it's being satisfied by foreign demand. that leaves us with output growth of 16.4%. some so when people say productivity growth and manufacturing employment, they really mean the interplay between demand and productivity growth. no one thinks that employment should have declined by 50%. they basically say productivity rose faster than demand so it's sort of the domestic influences. so those domestic influences, domestic demand growth minus productivity, that only explains

about little less than half of the total employment decline in manufacturing over that time. that wedge from the rising trade deficit explains about half. and so to my mind, just looking at this aggregate data, it's hard to not see the rise in manufacturing trade deficits is really colead with what has happened to manufacturing employment over that time. and then final ten seconds, so why did manufacturing trade deficits rise substantially over this time period? u.s. still has a very overvalued dollar, did for a lot of that period. that should ann laser focus for people who are concerned about thee infect of trade deficits on employment. thank you. [ applause ] >> thank you, josh. and our final discussant was to be professor michael hicks. he wasn't able to be here because of weather. the former epi president is going to read professor hick's prepared remarks.

thanks, larry. >> thank you. michael was concerned that the expected snow would allow him to get here but not to leave. and i guess he doesn't like washington. okay. i'm going to read his remarks and as supplemented by an e-mail from them this morning. he starts out acknowledging the significant decline in factory employment that's been very disruptive. and he writes, at the same time both real gdp and real value added production in u.s. manufacturing likely peaked in 2017 and absent business cycle disruptions have grown steadily across the historical horizon of data. likewise, the united states has experienced negative net exports since nine fiend 80 and the balance of trade with china was roughly 350 billion in 2016. given these data, a significant

body of research has attempted to explain the causes and consequences of these employment changes. dr. houseman's paper offers a useful, concise restatement of much of this analysis. she does so as her title suggests in two parts, which i discuss in turn. the causation of job losses is an important ingredient to policy interventions. despite common perception, data employment output suffers significant conceptual challenges so such issue as domestic outsourcing of non-production tasks, imprecise trade data and equality all affect conclusions which can be drawn from these data. dr. houseman explains much of the research on these issues but there are two issues that be merit comment. first, the limited work on bls bias, some of which is not reported, suggests more sim metro than this review suggests. and just to summarize he's saying sue says there are

studies which show that the bls productivity is overstated. he's pointing out that he thinks there's study that say it's understated. second, dr. houseman corrects a common error to economists to two casually attributing gains to simple automation. this was covered in her earlier work with michael men dell and in other papers. they may uncover such diverse contributions as better education, changes in union strength, and robotics. my only real critique of this section is that i believe it overstates the disagreement regarding the relative contribution of trade and productivity reported in the literature. part of the disagreement is tort logical. there was a surprising consensus across several studies using different techniques that identify pure trade-related manufacturing job losses during

the 2000s as between 750,000 and 1.5 million, between 10% to 30%. there's also agreement that some of the productivity job losses are motivated by competition induced by imports. do we call this a trade or productivity related job loss? i think an important contribution of this work is to motivate economists and policymakers to talk more broadly about measurement issues. i do think that dr. houseman is right in that there's unlikely to be -- that there is unlikely to be agreement on the figure but i think there's less disagreement among researchers than appears in either the policy debate or in the media. the consequences of manufacturing job loss are as in dr. houseman suggests, among the most robust findings in labor economics. in conclusion, dr. houseman has inn deuced another important analysis of the puzzle regarding the effect of productivity and trade on manufacturing employment.

i asked dr. hicks to expand his remarks in order to directly comment on the -- in one of the main issues that sue raises, which is can we attribute the erosion of manufacturing employment to automation or to, you know, rather than anything related to output related matters or trade. and -- okay. so here's what he says. while i concur that slow output growth say contributor to lower levels of manufacturing employment growth, i don't think it is necessarily relevant to exclude computers from the discussion.

susan may be correct -- there's a theme here. susan may be correct that bls waiting biases upward productivity growth but a full accounting of its total effect on manufacturing would require conducting some of the same analysis for noncomputer inputs. that was the point i attempted to make about earlier criticism of the bls. manufacturing goods are increasingly platforms for computing capacity that alter the value consumers receive from the product. that value likely exceeds the value of the products produced separately. thank you. [ applause ] >> thank you very much, larry. dr. dr. ball in absentia. before we go to the audience i'd like to gift panelists a chance to go back and forthwith each other. a couple of issues had been raised here and one of them until particular for sue is whether it's arbitrary to exclude computers from the manufacturing output and what --

why it is that we make that choice and what that tells us. and invite carolyn also to respond. thanks. >> sure. well, first i want to make really clear -- >> i think -- is it? is it on? >> it's on. >> sorry. >> i want to make really clear that i am not arguing that the adjustment of price deflators in the computer and electronics product industry is wrong. i'm not saying that productivity is biased. that the government estimates of productivity growth. there is a very row boat -- robust debate within the small corner of the economics provision that pays allot of attention to price deflators, okay.

and it is, you know, about whether these adjustments are too big or too little. and there is a very large debate going on right now about whether we should be more better adjusting other sorts of products and services, goods and services, particularly i.t. goods and services better for changes in product quality. my point, rather, is really twofold. one is that these productivity changes are not picking up automation. and too often in the public discussion we're pretty sloppy about that. we're assuming that productivity growth is, you know, implicitly or explicitly we're very often assuming in this debate the productivity growth is picking up automation. it's not, okay. and secondly, the reason i take out -- i think it's useful to take out computers is because when you are looking at the manufacturing numbers, the trends are just so dominated by what's happening in that one industry that it's really hard continue to interpret. i think that statistical agencies will be moving increasingly towards a better adjustment for product quality i think it's going to make things very difficult, more difficult for people to interpret the statistics in the way that they're used to interpreting

them. >> carolyn, do you want to add anything? >> yeah, i would. i would just add that i think there is -- there tends to be a view when we talk about productivity growth and automation that we're saying the industry's losing jobs because these jobs were all the mated. i think that's part of it, but i think it's a small part. the point i'm making is the really big part is about price elasticities income elasticities. they're just not big enough so that when productivity rises and prices come down that people want so many more of these goods. and then if people want the same amount of these goods or maybe a little bit more and productivity's risen a ton, that's going to cost jobs. so it's not automation that's costing jobs, it's this

relative -- the relative price problem. and short of structural change as well on top of that, which has led us to consume more services than goods. so i think the productivity still plays a really big role, in my mind, automation in combination with this relative productivity hypothesis is the lion's share. i still think trade in this period, you know, was probably, you know, the 20% to 40% people want to allot it. i don't have a problem with that. and it is important we do have to think about it like josh, i think it is much more do with the real exchange rate than trade policy. and then just on taking out one

industry, you know, why should i take out one industry? i have the whole set of data, let's do that with all our data, take out one industry and i can show you almost any correlation. so i do think it's problematic to take out -- to take out one industry or at least then let's talk about all industries because there's some interesting things going on, as i mentioned, especially in transportation equipment, machinery, you know, things that the u.s. is really good at producing that we should also focus on. so if we're going to take out one industry, let's at least look at all disaggregated data, not computers, everything else. >> but carolyn, do you agree that there's something unique about the -- >> oh, yeah. >> computer indexes and the way we calculate price changes and quality changes so that you have this kind of small -- very small industry which is actually in decline. and i think it is contributing to the counterintuitive sense where i think a lot of americans certainly manufacturing employment and job and trade was a huge issue in the 2016 presidential election and has been a tribute ter to growing inequality and the decline in communities particularly in the

midwest. and then people have this sense and then a lot of pundits come out and say you're all wrong, you're idiots there's nothing wrong with manufacturing because manufacturing output is growing and there's nothing happening here except that you're all idiots. what sue is trying to pull out is the idea there's something strange that happens in the data. the adjustment that happens which is when you say, you know, your computer this year has twice as much computing power has it had last year and temperature costs pretty much the same or 10 dollars more, then you all of the sudden have bought twice as many computers so that both the -- what we see about the health of output of gdp and productivity is rescued by some necessary adjustments to computer prices and quantities. but that they are also misleading us when we try to think sensibly about what's actually happening. >> i think that's a -- i think that's a fair point.

i would just say that i think we have to be careful, then, do that in other industries as well. that doing that only with computers rescues the discussion in one direction. >> but, susan, does that fix the problem if you took out textile and apparel, for example? >> i don't think that the other, you know, the productivity growth in the other sectors isn't going to make that much difference in terms of to change the overall picture if the what changes the picture, and i have experimented with this, but it doesn't change the overall picture. another industry where there is a difference is autos. i've taken out autos but it's not enough to make a difference. computers is unique among itself in sort of the magnitude in the changes. i want to while i have the microphone, i did want to reply to one of carol's one other comments.

and it's very common to say, well, this study, repeat being -- repeating what i said, this study found 25%, that study found 30% so the rest is probably automation. that's a problem. right now what you should be saying is what was the technology shock that occurred in the early 2000s that caused a nearly 20% decline? now near 30% decline in employment? and people that have tried to look at that have come up short. now, i emphasize that there's holes in the research. the debate's still open. but that's the question that you have to answer. it's not sort of saying, because research is slow, it's hard to kind of, as you know, carolyn, it's hard to get sort of very convincing causal evidence. so it's looking at this trade

policy on employment and so forth. so it's not complete. what needs to be done is for researchers to come up, if you really believe the automation story's going on for some compelling evidence that there was a technology shock in the early 2000s that caused the collapse and that it was specific to manufacturing to that caused that decline. and then just quickly, i completely agree with carolyn, the trade and i perhaps didn't make it as clear as i should have during my talk, you know, we all benefit a lot from trade. nobody's, you know, at least not -- i'm certainly not arguing for, you know, throwing up walls at the border, okay. i think that what was really unique and special or special isn't the right adjective but what was really unique about the early 2000s was just the

attitude of the shock. i was trying to get at that in my discussion about dislocated workers. the size really matters. and we had a very large trade shock then. and that's where i think the problem is most serious. and it's that it's -- it's that policies, whether it's good -- exchange rates or anything else, may have led to large, sudden shifts in the structure of global production that can be especially problematic for an economy. >> i just -- i just wanted to add about this thing that while if it's not trade and we don't have this big productivity growth then it has to -- we have to come back to trade, that if you really look at the data and just the timing of when the job loss happened, it's one thing, recessions. so in recessions, that's when

the job loss happens and so then it goes back to the demand. the demand suddenly drops, you've been holding workers for a long time as productivity's been increasing, and then during the recession you let those workers go. so i don't think if we look at the timing of when they fall versus the technology in trade it's the right way to look at that time because it's extraordinarily lumpy when that job loss happens. it wasn't a continuity over this period when china was increasing exports to the u.s., it was really two distinct periods when a lot of job loss happened that happened because of, you know, holding too much labor and then a recession hits and that forces this readjustment. >> okay. yeah, on that point, because it's related to what i wanted to talk about. i think one way to think about this, the way i think about it, is productivity growth as we've

all shown, it's basically been on relatively the same pace for a long time. it's the background music to the manufacturing sector. and then what changes to cause sort of job losses is what's happening to output growth around that. and i think two things. post 2000 you basically have a huge decline in output growth relative to sort of the trend and relative to productivity. and i think, one, there's the obvious answer of rising trade deficits that that's to put that big wedge between what u.s. consumers demand and what they produced. and it's true, we've had a slow growing macroeconomy since 2000. that's where you've got the background productivity going fast in production and you you will down shift the overall level of growth you're going to

run into some problems in that sector. in regards to the lumpiness of job losses, there's two tells that it's not just to recessions. one the evidence that i talked about in my talk, we had a roaring economy from 97 to 2000 and zero manufacturing growth, it declined as trade deficits rise. after the 2001 recession which was heavy in manufacturing but mild overall, we got none of those jobs back before the great recession hit. and we got none of them back because as the overall economy grew and consumers wanted to buy things again, they were much likely to buy imports over china during that time. most of it happens during recessions but the complete failure to point to any recovery at all between those recessions to me say big tell that sort of the trade deficits were a big player. >> thanks very much to all the panelists and we do have time for some questions. we'd like to open to the audience. please wait for the microphone. state your name and affiliation, if you have one, and we'll take maybe two or three questions and then allow the panelists to respond. >> hi, robert leccer from american university and in the interest of full disclosure i'm an epi research associate.

i would like to actually challenge the idea that we have to accept the productivity numbers from computers. i understand that i'm not talking about the exact numbers. but, to me, the way we measure variables should depend on the purpose of our analysis. so if we want to know, and i think michael hicks put it very well when he said the value consumers receive from something like a laptop or your car, yes, we do the adjustment, of course, that computer is far more powerful than the ones we used to have. but if we want to know how productive are the workers in the factories to put the chips in and put it altogether or even the workers in the assembly line somewhere who make the chips, they're not making more chips or more laptops or more cars than

they used to, it's just things are plugging in because of knowledge increases and technological innovation create more value for the consumer. but i would challenge the idea that in terms of productivity that's really different. second point, some of this conversation at the end, how do we account for the fact that there's this precipitous decline in the total amount of manufacturing productivity -- sorry, manufacturing employment and yet this continuous decline with no change in the trend in the share of manufacturing employment? and the answer has to do with something josh was hinting at at the end, this stagnation of the remembering, secular stagnation since somewhere around 2000. if you look at the total number of jobs created in the u.s. economy, from 1960 to 2000 it was about 2 million jobs a year. since 2000 i haven't got the latest numbers but well under 1 million. there was less than half of the annual rate of job creation overall. now, why are we having this stagnation? i don't have time go into that. but the only aren't ratio ha is doing the same thing when the numerator has gone off the

charts because the denominator is not doing very well. >> pat. >> theo, thank you for put thong terrific program. i want to make two points. i was on the banking committee staff from '83 to '97, and i saw the movement from stakeholder to shareholder capitalism, which is -- and there are two chapters under the back called the golden passport about the history of harvard business school which describe this phenomenon. the second thing, i was on the china commission for ten years and saw the movement of what happened once we got china in the wto. people say we didn't give china a different tariff after they were in there, but what we did, we gave it to them permanently. we could always take mfn away from them until they come into the wto. without that, they would have faced a 42% tariff in the u.s., with mfn was probably lower than 4%. that's a key thing. and he then when our companies are driven by shareholder value

to increase their posts for their shareholders and the other countries are offering them subsidies, underpriced exchange rates, it's going to cost them. they're going to move your production from here to there. i'm wondering, have you guys focused on shareholder capitalism as a problem or as a factor of all of this has happened to the american worker over the last 15 years which has led to the results in the last election? >> thanks, pat. >> hi, i'm alan and i write the reality check blog and thank you all for this great conference and thank you all for these very high-quality exercises in economic analysis. and i've got one observation and then one suggestion that i hope you'll all react to. one, it's really a shame that it's all necessary. and i say that because you all agree that there are big data flaws here that you've got to

try to work around and circumvent and try to explain, and yet there is a big body of data that is out there that could explain a great deal that no one looks at because there's no obligation on the part of the major players to make it publicly available. and what i mean by that is the major players, especially when it comes, you know, to job offshoring are, of course, for the american economy u.s.-based multi national companies. they know exactly how many workers they've moved all around the world. they know exactly what they make because if they didn't have this information, they probably couldn't be profitable. so wouldn't it be great if every

company in this country at least above a certain size had to report every year how many jobs have you moved overseas? how many jobs back? we do have actually, of course, labor department data that tells us how many workers have lost jobs from foreign competition, but we have got flaws there too because a lot of -- because a lot of the folks who lose jobs don't know that they have this option which leads, you know, down the road to various retraining programs. so it would be great if all the organizations up here and everybody else who studies trade policy started pressing washington to force multi national companies to release this data and then we could know what's happening rather than have to engage in all of very sophisticated but ultimately unsatisfying economic analysis. >> thank you, alan. >> one more quick question and then we'll let the panelists. sorry, just want to squeeze it in. >> quick question but a large

one. i'm carolina young, i'm an congressional fellow in senator warren's office. in terms of all sorts of things upscaling for workers. >> thank you. that's a great last question. thank you. >> okay. so, first, on robert's questions -- question about computers and should this productivity growth really be -- show up somehow in the

manufacturing sector. not to publicize my own work, but i've actually argued within an article with tim sturgeon at m.i.t. my colleague at the upjohn institute, that probably the great productivity growth in computers is to a large degree being driven by research and development, and that probably should be not booked to productivity. to manufacturing, rather. the problem is that we're not -- we don't know how to adjust, yet, services, prices to book that productivity growth to the services industry. it's really a huge challenge. it's way beyond the scope of this. but i -- bottom line, i would agree. we don't -- we don't really know how to develop reasonable measures for r&d services.

interestingly, as production in the sectors is moving overseas, and you get, perhaps, some of the r&d staying here, you may see it showing up less and less as productivity growth in the united states -- in the u.s. economy, simply because we don't sort of measure it very well. that productivity growth. that improvements to products coming out of r&d. i do agree with -- very much with pat malloy's comments about kind of the change in the way corporations are run, the movement from stakeholder to shareholder value, that that has, you know, certainly had a big effect, and the pressure on companies, which is very real, to increase margins, maximize profits, is perhaps and almost certainly to some degree pushed companies to shift more quickly overseas to increase margins than one would have seen in the past. i think it's an important phenomenon. some people are looking at it, but it's arguably understudied.

alan, i always favor more and better data. and i actually do think that, you know, kind of the globalization of things has just made it harder to measure stuff, and we need to think more broadly about collecting better data to better understand the competitiveness of domestic manufacturing and other industries. i mean, sort of need to rethink the architecture of our statistical system in that way. finally, carolina from mark warner's office, policies, wow, there's a whole host, and i think that my colleagues will have more to say about that. but certainly, you know, there's -- there's a host of macro policies. i think there's broad agreement that -- and appreciation or overvalued exchange rates is a huge problem and we should be cautious about that happening -- allowing that to happen in the future. and as josh has argued, perhaps

they're still overvalued, but i'm going to stay out of that debate. in terms of the -- of the nitty-gritty, the -- there's certainly a lot of very good vocational training programs and the like that can make a big difference for the skills of workers in manufacturing, there's a big demand for that and i think that sort of vocational education should be expanded. >> great. great questions. let me start with the pntr one, because i really fundamentally

disagree with that view that pntr had a big effect. before china was granted pntr, there was no time when it reverted once it got, you know, preferential -- or the mfn status. we never reverted away from that. so, what's to make us think we would have? and we did have two really important tools, which we still use -- which the u.s. still uses today, which are, you know, anti-dumping and countervailing duties, which were used very heavily against china. so, i think that there were policies in place, but let me turn to research on the topic. there's a great new paper by mary, john, rob, and one other person, and what it shows is that it wasn't about anything other countries granted china. to the extent you want to argue it was wto accession, it was china's own liberalization.

so the fact that all of a sudden in china, you had access to cheaper intermediates and you could enter into global supply chains and all this had a much bigger effect on china's export growth than anything other countries granted. so we pushed china to liberalize but remember that some of that liberalization is going to improve their own productivity, so it's reforms china made that really had the biggest -- the biggest impact. in terms of policy recommendations, before i went on leave from the institute, chad and i were working on two policy briefs, exactly on this question. and one compares -- looks at the decline in u.s. labor force participation compared to other countries and tries to understand. the other one looks at lessons from other countries on labor market policies, because while other countries have very similar experiences overall in

terms of gdp growth and declining manufacturing, what they didn't have was some of the -- the declining labor force participation that the u.s. had. and why is that? and one, we spent a lot less on labor market policies than other countries in the oscd, in particular job placement policies, training, but that's not going to be enough if there's really a structural change and demand felt, so then you need to turn to policies like wage insurance, potentially public works, though i visited the hoover dam over the holidays, and was amazed that, you know, it was finished two years early and employed all these people at a time of great

difficulty. so i think -- i think given the state of infrastructure in this country, there is a way to boost demand through infrastructure, and then on top of that, have these policies for labor that could do a lot. and then finally, just to say that if we really think, you know, it's about -- and i think most people do, that the trade deficit, when we're not at full employment, is going to be making it more difficult for workers, i think there's research showing that fiscal policy is important. so, if you're going to run a fiscal deficit, that means the government's consuming more than it has in revenues, than its production, and some of that is going to go to imports, and so that's going to pull the deficit and so forth. so, why don't i stop there, but those were great questions. thank you. >> yes. i'll say a couple words on policy first because that is a

very, very long discussion and so just the headlines. if you're really worried on sort of the narrower issue, and it's a big issue, but it's narrower relative to all the other problems in the american economy of manufacturing employment, to my mind, dealing with misaligned exchange rates is the really key one. and dealing with them in a way that's credible in the long run. i mean, it's one thing to say, you know, we should make the dollar go down for a couple of years. that won't do a lot. i mean, there needs to be real credibility that the u.s. is now committed to never again allowing the dollar to just annihilate the u.s. manufacturing sector. that means doing something like we've got a federal reserve that monitors this one really important macroeconomic price that is the interest rate. we say, that is your job, to adjust it depending on economic conditions. it seems to me we should probably have something like that for the exchange rate. it's an extraordinarily important macroeconomic price and that's one we just allow to

whip all around and it causes a lot of damage. i think big picture ideas on how to credibly commit to never allowing the dollar to do what it did to manufacturing again is a big part of the story there. i would also agree. i think infrastructure investment would be really key for a couple reasons. one, i think we need it. i think we've underinvested in it for a long time. i think we have some slack to be rung out of the economy and it's particularly good for manufacturing. it buys a lot of inputs from the manufacturing sector so i think that would be a very good thing. i think turning to pat's point for a second about, you know, these policies are sensible enough, why haven't they happened, i think his point is really interesting because it reminds us that most trade policy, if you think of it as a u.s. v. china or u.s. v. mexico, you will get it wrong every time. trade policy is about people within the united states and people within china and within mexico and how the interests

collide and to be really clear on this, everyone agrees that the chinese government managing the value of their currency for competitive gain in the early 2000s, and made -- many people may have been like, why is the u.s. allowing that to happen? which u.s.? walmart loves this. walmart gets really cheap imports from this policy. so the fact that manufacturing workers in some states are getting hammered and walmart likes it, well, who do you think wins that policy debate most of the time? so i think the really key thing i take from pat's comment is exactly that. these are not nations versus nations conflicts. these are really class-based conflicts within nations. that's the way you need to look at this stuff. >> that's a great note on which to end. i'd like to please join me in thanking our panelists. thank you all for coming out today, and i hope this will be just the beginning of an ongoing conversation about policy in the important area of trade, automation, manufacturing, and the future of work. thank you very much. thanks to c-span and we hope to see you again soon.

on thursday former secretaries of state testify before the senate armed services committee on u.s. national security strategy. you can watch that live at 10:00 a.m. eastern on c-span. friday president trump addresses the world economic forum in switzerland. he'll be the first sitting u.s. president to address the forum

since president clinton. live coverage begins at 8:00 a.m. on c-span 2. >> the president of the united stat states. >> tuesday night president trump gives his first state of union address to congress and the nation. join c-span for a preview of the evening starting at 8:00 eastern and then the speech at 9:00. following the speech the democratic response. president trump's state of the union address tuesday night live on c-span. listen live with the free c-span radio app. american history tv on c-span3. this week in prime time, tonight at 8:00 p.m., historians attending the conference look at how american veterans are being remembered, honored and memorialized since world war ii. thursday night at 7:00 p.m.

eastern we're live from the museum in washington, d.c. with the discussion on the 1968 vietnam war. watch american history tv this week in primetime on c-span3. where are you from? come here. >> the moment itself i described at the time and i still describe it as a bizarre moment. it was a surprise when he sort of called me over. he's the president of the united states and you're in the oval office. if he says who are you, come on here, you don't really have an option.

in her book in america. >> drain the swamp as three words is incredibly provocative. you know what he's talking about. taking the horrible that live there and replacing it with better people. whether voters believed him or not or believed he could fill fill that or not, they were prepared to take a chance on it. next, a hearing held by the house veterans affairs subcommittee that examines a type of home loan refinance processing known as turning that targets veterans and service members.