I read about this book in the "New York Times" a week or so ago and downloaded it this morning. It sounded like it shared some characteristics with other books I have enjoyed that explain some of the economic characteristics of different products and put them in a global context - books like "Extra Virgin" (about olive oil) and "Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy". I told myself I'd read the first chapter this morning, then put it down until tonight.

I emerged six hours later.

My god, this book is AMAZING. Everyone who cares about communities, or about the economy, must read it. It makes me want to question every decision we make about trade agreements, retail purchases, federal subsidies, labor laws, and tax policy. Thank heavens for Bassett, who didn't drink the Koolaid - and for Beth Macy, who has managed to humanize modern global economics and make it understandable for everyone.

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When I first read about and heard about this book, I was sure I wanted to read it. I live in Southside Virginia. Before I moved here, DuPont and Tultex had closed. Since I’ve lived here, I’ve seen the closings of all the major companies that made this area the manufacturing powerhouse it was. Now that’ve read the book, I would highly recommend it as an explanation for how American jobs were handed over to foreign interests. We rolled over and played dead.

The really good parts: Beth Macy did an excellent job of going step-by-step through what happened to the furniture industry that built this area, both in its heyday and in its capitulation to Asian manufacturing. Finally, someone talked about the out-sourcing of American jobs remembering the people who were hurt by them. These are people who will never have a job that good again before they retire. They were trained for factory work that doesn’t exist anymore. If they want a job that pays almost as well as the one they lost, they have to leave the area. Thousands already have. If other Americans think it isn’t coming to their towns, they’re wrong.

Ms. Macy rightfully takes to task the economists in their ivory towers. They talk about the consumer getting a better deal by having cheaper products available to them. This kind of short-sighted thinking does not consider a major factor in this equation—consumers have to have jobs in order to consume. No job, no buying the cheap products that put them out of work. No buying, slow economy that takes a long time to recover. This ought to sound familiar to anyone listening to economic news these days.
Even more telling was the comment made by the Asian who marveled that American capitalists would do anything for a buck, including give away their manufacturing knowledge and jobs. He said once they had these things, they wouldn’t be stupid enough to give them up.

I appreciated her declaring at the beginning of the book her own biases—she was the daughter of factory workers in Ohio and had seen her own parents put out of work when the jobs were taken somewhere else. She acknowledged that she liked some of the main characters in the book more than others, including her admiration for John D. Bassett, III, the book’s main character. She pointedly remembered the folks others wouldn’t have remembered—the factory workers, especially the black ones, and the domestic workers of the factory owners.

My one and only complaint was at the beginning of the book, when she talks about the history of the extended Bassett family, she put in every piece of gossip she was told. Macy wrote that the curator of the Bassett Heritage Center told her to. However, I thought she should have exercised a little more judgment. Some pieces of extended family history were just hurtful to no particular end. Some details were tawdry and unnecessary.

That said, I would highly recommend the rest of the book.

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‘Yes it’s happened. America is not the country it once was, how has that happened; have we moved forward into a new better existence or hopelessly lost our way? Beth Macy’s story of the battle to save an industry in the age of Globalization is a masterful telling of the ten years of demise of factory after factory as imports replace Appalachia’s hold on furniture production that had in turn taken down Michigan and New England. Her tale can easily be shifted to almost all manufacturing sectors of the American economy. Its uniqueness is the focus on one man who, as some have said, gave China the middle finger.
“Between 2001 and 2012, 63,300 American factories closed their doors and five million American factory jobs went away. During that same time, China’s manufacturing base ballooned to the tune of 14.1 million new jobs.”

“But we didn’t have to close ’em all.”
A sad reality, in August 2013 the Associated Press announced new data showing that four in five American adults will face poverty during their lifetimes. It was one of the first national news articles … that directly connected growing poverty to the increasingly globalized economy and the destruction of factory jobs. Beth Macy focuses on one industry and one region but the beauty of her telling is that you see the statistical occurrence as affecting people in all the ways it can; the owners taking their stock options as value increased and employment fell and moving on happily marketing imports, to the unemployed watching their towns and lives disintegrate.

Her hero is John D. Bassett III, JBIII as he becomes, and that is a story well told; a man who saves most of his firm and reorganizes the resistance to Asian ‘dumping’ winning compensation that enabled many to survive and restructure their trade despite resistance from all who were finding acceptance wiser and profitable. Unfortunately it is not a How To manual, the damaged for most is done the horse has bolted the barn, but good reading by any standard. Selected one of ten best books of 2014 by a Times’ reviewer and others.
Don’t miss it.

A quote on the concept called Comparative Advantage you may have been drilled on in Econ I A: “To most economists, factory work was a throwback. It was still okay to work in health care, retail, recreation, insurance, hotels, and haircuts. But it wasn’t cool anymore to actually make stuff.”
In 2012, there were 1.75 billion cell phones made in the world— and not one was manufactured in the United States.

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very well written and well researched story. The second part of the book is both exciting and very factual.

A must read for those of us connected with the US furniture Industry and it's near total destruction of imports from China.

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Good experience.

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Very good read and fascinating story!