October 06, 2025; most recent update January 25, 2026
Why the Ratio of Robots to Factory Workers Increases
With continually better technology, increases in production efficiency have regularly reduced the percentage of manufacturing workers needed relative to the total U.S. population and economy. Population increases might require more or roughly the same total number of manufacturing workers, but any increase in productivity -- such as through better technology -- decreases the proportion of such workers needed. Since the 1940s, this percentage has continued to fall pretty consistently, independent of U.S. companies offshoring manufacturing in more recent times. Not surprisingly, this has been happening around the world, including China, not just in the United States:
1. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2019/12/the-global-decline-of-manufacturing/
3. https://ifr.org/news/robots-china-breaks-historic-records-in-automation/
Suppose a manufacturer doesn't add any more machines but just replaces the old ones with the technologically superior new ones, meaning they can produce more in the same time period than the old. What happens? Fewer workers are needed, assuming all other important factors remain the same.
As technology improves, the better machines are more likely to meet all or a higher portion of the greater production required for increased demand or increased market presence. But even if more workers are necessary, fewer new hires are needed than before for an equivalent increase in production.
In other words, as technology improves, the ratio of robots/machines to human workers increases.
Moreover, there are reasons why not only the ratio is changing, but that more robots are being purchased by manufacturers.
China has some demographic issues and other motivations that help explain why it has greatly increased the presence of robots in its manufacturing workforce. But the fundamental reason behind this happening there and elsewhere isn't complicated. If you're a business, you need a customer. Automation helps cut costs in a number of ways, including through economies of scale, and thus ultimately prices.
Therefore offshoring does explain some of the decline in U.S. manufacturing employment, but it's not the full picture.
Even from a national security standpoint, automation will continue to play a bigger role in manufacturing. In the event of a long war, time and money are of the essence, and automation helps produce military hardware quicker and cheaper. Robots also better ensure consistent quality: they don't fatigue physically or mentally, and make things the very same way each time.
So, when people say that the U.S. has "moved beyond" being a manufacturing-heavy nation, and that current manufacturing powerhouses will too eventually, that's not to imply that highly developed nations don't need much manufacturing. Rather, it's that manufacturing employment tends to become a smaller percentage of the workforce as technology progresses and is therefore not as reliable at creating jobs as it was in the past.