The share of U.S. jobs in manufacturing has fallen from a peak of 19.5 million in 1979 to 12.3 million at the end of 2016. Over that period 53 million non-manufacturing jobs replaced the 7.2 million lost jobs. The primary explanation for the long-term decline in manufacturing jobs is not so much President Donald Trump's blunt stance that U.S. companies "moved jobs overseas," but the fact that there has been a rise in employment elsewhere in the jobs market. In 1950, employment in U.S. manufacturing was 13.16m, while that in the rest of the economy was 30m. By the end of 2016, it had fallen to 12.27m, but the total number of America jobs rose to 133m — the increase in employment between 1950 and the end of 2016 occurred outside manufacturing. Harvard economist Richard Freeman also points out that "almost all at once in the 1990s, China, India, and the ex-Soviet bloc joined the global economy. This change greatly increased the size of the global labour pool from approximately 1.46 billion workers to 2.93 billion workers." By 2010 China had displaced the U.S. as the largest manufacturing nation. China's share of world production reached 18.9% and hit 23.2% in 2013; while the U.S. share declined from 18.1% in 2010 to 17.2% in 2013.
