Today’s news from Tim Cook that Apple is bringing some Mac manufacturing from China back to the United States is encouraging for the first reason you’ll think of: it’s a tentative move to disengage from appalling labor practices at the company’s Chinese contractor, Foxconn, that tether anyone who owns an iPhone back to the developing world economy heart of darkness. But what does it mean for the American economy? For years, we’ve been told that the migration of manufacturing offshore is an economic inevitability, the result of ironclad laws of trade, labor and capital. Steve Jobs himself said of the China offshoring: “those jobs aren’t coming back.”

But what if those assumptions are wrong? For some valuable background, I recommend my friend Charles Fishman’s excellent piece on the insourcing trend in the current issue of The Atlantic. It suggests that moves such as Apple’s are more than just post-crash green shoots, replacing lost jobs with new ones, but a genuine shift back to U.S. manufacturing with concrete – and previously unrecognized – advantages.

Fishman focuses on another, equally surprising, insourcing story: over the past year, General Electric has revived its principal U.S. appliance manufacturing facility, a huge complex in Louisville, Kentucky. During its height in the 1970s, GE’s Appliance Park employed 23,000. As of last year, that number had plummeted to 1,863. As recently as 2008 GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt was looking to sell the place. But then GE decided to start manufacturing appliances again, invested $800 million and started hiring. By the end of 2012, the number of employees will have rebounded to 3,600, with plans for more.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnmcquaid/2012/12/06/why-apple-is-bringing-manufacturing-back-to-the-united-states/