The Wall Street Journal has an excellent piece comparing the two occupational categories. Both of them provide decent-paying work to people with relatively low skill levels — and both have suffered severe losses over the past two decades. The interesting questions are (1) why manufacturing has drawn so much more public attention and (2) whether it would be justifiable to try to bring back one job category through public policy, but not the other.

On (1), one reason is that plant closings are more spectacular and concentrated than are the more gradual and dispersed losses of administrative-assistant positions, and another is that the manufacturing decline largely resulted from a deliberate policy, that of opening up trade with China.

On (2), you can certainly build a case for helping out manufacturing because certain industries are vital to national security or international competition. But to the extent that “industrial policy” and similar proposals to boost manufacturing are instead simply designed to bring back “good jobs,” one wonders why this one sector deserves such favoritism.

Lurking under all this, of course, is the fact that manufacturing workers tend to be men while administrative assistants tend to be women. Sociologically speaking, it’s true that men’s and women’s job losses have different impacts, especially in regards to marriage — so I suppose you could argue that decent-paying jobs for low-skilled men are just more important. But as I pointed out last month, it would be both politically and legally fraught for the government to deliberately aid one sex, but not the other, in the job market.