"The next president of the United States, whoever he is, will end his term with fewer Americans working in manufacturing than he inherited.”

Writing for Bloomberg Businessweek, David J. Lynch quotes (above) a prediction from London School of Economics professor Tim Leunig.

It’s impossible to know if this prediction will come true, but competing pieces of data make one thing certain – where reshoring is concerned there is no certainty.

Earlier this year, President Obama cited instances of jobs returning to the United States, including manufacturing positions at General Electric and Caterpillar. The President also mentioned, as we at ManufactureThis have, something that a Boston Consulting Group survey indicated:

"37 percent of manufacturers with sales of more than $1 billion and almost half of those with more than $10 billion ‘plan to or are actively considering bringing back production from China to the U.S.’”

While this all sounds like good news, Lynch thinks we should step back and take a look at the bigger picture.

He suggests that for every company that brings jobs back to the United States, there’s a company shipping its jobs away. It’s this insight, coupled with the fact that some American companies are pulling jobs out of China only to send them to other foreign countries that leads people like Professor Leunig to make predictions like the one above.

Read more here.

Photo taken by flickr user joguldi and used with Creative Commons license.