Oren Cass
Oren Cass appears in Why are we so obsessed with manufacturing? as a manufacturing-policy voice focused on wages, productivity, and location. He argues that employers complaining about hard-to-fill manufacturing jobs should raise pay, while also saying competitiveness depends on productivity relative to wages.
The source uses Cass to connect factory enthusiasm to concrete labor-market discipline. If jobs remain vacant, the issue may not only be a missing worker pipeline; it may be that the job offer is not attractive enough under current Manufacturing Job Quality conditions.
Would you trust an economist with your economy? adds Cass as the critic inside an American Economic Association panel on economics and politics. In that source, he argues that economists missed or mishandled free trade with China, the 2008 financial crisis, inflation, and the persuasion problem facing the profession, making him part of the Economist Trust Crisis branch rather than only the manufacturing-jobs branch.
Connections
- Manufacturing Job Quality - pay and work conditions that affect labor supply.
- Manufacturing Workforce Pipeline - skills and training branch that interacts with wages.
- Good Jobs For Non-College Workers - broader policy target.
- Tradable Sector Local Growth - location argument around where manufacturing can plausibly operate.
- American Economic Association, China Shock, Free Trade Distributional Cost, and Economist Trust Crisis - economics-profession critique branch added by Planet Money.