Well , part of that increase of output per worker is that the labor intensive manufacturing was the type of manufacturing most likely to be sent to China . That happened for what one hopes are painfully obvious reasons , Chinese people used to work for a dollar a day . Etc etc . If the policy changed to encourage labor intensive manufacturing to come back to the US it would probably cause output per worker to go down . And , I guess , according to Brookings that would be a failure . I don ' t have an answer but I do know we ' re pretty far down the globalization road to say oh hey , let ' s make shoes in NY again . We can ' t magically untransplant jobs from China back to create middleclass jobs in the US in some kind of reverseglobalization .