These people think we’re going back to the 1950s, says the East Coast.
The reference, of course, is to anyone who doesn’t work for West-Coast tech, East-Coast finance, some sort of university, or a Starbucks.
In other words, the reference is to people in, say, Ohio.
The implication is that manufacturing is dead, and that not-particularly-intelligent Midwesterners need to deal with it.
Those jobs aren’t coming back, is a popular NPR-supported refrain.
How do I know all this?
Because I spent 25 years of my life on the East Coast.
And I said these lines myself, wondering why Ohioans can’t just move on.
But after spending a decade and a half in Western New York, aka the Ohio of New York State, I’ve found myself asking other questions.
What if those jobs never truly went away?
What if the dirty work, as in the stuff apparently better suited for lowly foreigners in Mexico and Asia, is still sullying our beautiful country?
I pulled up my preferred resources, one by one.
First was Wikipedia, specifically a list of US states and territories by GDP.
Ohio, as of 2024, was number seven, exactly what would be expected by population alone.
Then, being the cutting-edge internet guy that I am, I simply asked Google a question: What is the breakdown of Ohio’s GDP by sector? (Because I’m particularly hip, I didn’t actually use the apostrophe or caps.)
Per the AI overview, Ohio’s GDP is heavily anchored by manufacturing, which as of 2024-2025 accounts for approximately 16-16.5% of the state’s [private-sector] economic output, significantly higher than the national average.
Somewhat taken aback, I figured a large chunk of this had to be in advanced manufacturing, as in the kind that elites can get behind.
So I clicked on Dive deeper in AI mode, where I was immediately greeted by a chart showing that in 2024, $137.9 billion of Ohio’s GDP was attributable to manufacturing, the most of any sector in the state.
How many people in Ohio are employed in manufacturing? I asked.
As of December 2025, approximately 692,900 to 694,800 people in Ohio are employed in the manufacturing sector, replied AI. Ohio consistently ranks as the third-largest state in the US for manufacturing employment, trailing only [the far more populated] California and Texas.
Then I kept reading, and my heart sank.
Ohio holds national leadership positions in several specific areas:
- #1 nationally in glass, plastics, and rubber product manufacturing
- #2 nationally in primary metals, machinery, and electrical equipment
What kind of country do we live in, where people still have the audacity to make this low-class, non-advanced stuff?
What if that which the East Coast insists is nostalgia isn’t really nostalgia?
What if it’s—gasp—alive?!
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