Americans have expressed distress over the demise of manufacturing in this country for as long as I can remember. Often that distress has been reflected in popular culture. In “My Hometown,” a hit from his blockbuster album “Born in the U.S.A.,” Bruce Springsteen lamented the economic decline of small-town America and the disappearance of working-class factory jobs his father’s generation grew up with:

They’re closing down the textile mill
Across the railroad tracks.
Foreman says, “These jobs are going, boys
And they ain’t coming back
To your hometown….”

In 1989, Michael Moore came to prominence with “Roger & Me,” a satirical documentary about the closing of a General Motors auto plant and the resulting layoff of thousands of local workers, in Flint, Mich. Philipp Meyer’s much-praised 2009 novel, “American Rust” (later adapted into a TV show of the same name), is set in a Pennsylvania town beset by stagnation and despair ever since its steel mill closed years ago.

Today, the issue seems as politically potent as ever. From progressives like Bernie Sanders proclaiming that their great goal is “to rebuild the manufacturing sector in America” to MAGA populists like President Trump pledging in his inaugural address that “America will be a manufacturing nation once again,” the revival of old-fashioned manufacturing appears to be the rare subject on which both sides of the aisle concur. In a national survey conducted by YouGov last year for the Cato Institute, 80 percent of all respondents agreed that “America would be better off if more people worked in manufacturing.”

But would it? According to the same survey, the overwhelming majority of Americans say that they personally would not be better off if they worked in a factory. “For all the … nostalgia about manufacturing jobs, most Americans aren’t on board with the idea of returning to work in factories,” economist Veronique de Rugy wrote last month in National Review.

Her words are borne out by more than poll results. Hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs go unfilled every month. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were more than 480,000 job openings in US factories in January, yet employers struggle to find workers to take them.

The National Association of Manufacturers has been warning consistently that the industry cannot find enough employees for the jobs it has available. “Over the next decade, 3.8 million manufacturing jobs will likely be needed, and 1.9 million are expected to be unfilled if we do not inspire more people to pursue modern manufacturing careers,” the NAM frets in a fact sheet. When it surveyed its members last year, 65 percent of them identified “attracting and retaining talent” as their foremost business challenge. Meanwhile the unemployment rate within the manufacturing sector has continued to decrease — it was down to 3.1 percent in March.

Plainly, the vast majority of Americans are not yearning for those jobs in “the textile mill / across the railroad tracks,” no matter how poignantly Springsteen evoked them.

At the same time, all those millions of jobs are striking proof that America retains its ability to make things, notwithstanding the endless populist dirges to the contrary. The United States manufactures and exports more goods than any other country on earth except China, which has a population four times the size of ours. American factories continue to churn out trillions of dollars worth of products annually — everything from Pfizer pharmaceuticals to Raytheon missiles to Tyson beef to Boeing aircraft to DuPont petrochemicals to Ford trucks.

To be sure, US plants have largely turned away from making many of the low-tech, labor-intensive consumer items they once specialized in — sneakers, T-shirts, small appliances, toys. Those jobs have mostly gone overseas, and trying to bring them back by means of a trade war would be ruinous. Yet America remains a global manufacturing powerhouse — highly skilled, highly innovative, and highly efficient. It is also, as it has been for many decades, a global services powerhouse. Meanwhile, as in every advanced country, the service sector in the United States accounts for an even greater share of national wealth than manufacturing. For most American families, careers in fields like health care, law, banking, and computer science long ago supplanted factory jobs as the surest path to middle-class comfort.

What all this adds up to is not, as the gloom-and-doomers of the progressive left and the MAGA right insist, an economically ravaged nation incapable of decently employing its people. Rather, this is a nation that, with all its failings, continues to boast the mightiest, most resilient economy in history. Manufacturing employment has been decreasing for 80 years, yet manufacturing output is at or near its all-time high. So is manufacturing capacity. So is the average American’s economic standard of living (real per-capita GDP). So is the median US household income. Fewer jobs in US steel mills and assembly lines didn’t mean the end of US manufacturing. Nor did it mean the end of US prosperity.

Most Americans — often including mothers and children, like these berry-pickers in Pennsylvania more than a century ago— once worked on farms. But such jobs disappeared as American agriculture grew vastly more productive. Clamoring to “bring back” traditional farm employment would be absurd. So is calling for the return of old-style factory work.

It is worth remembering that the goal of manufacturing is to make goods, not jobs — just as the goal of agriculture is to grow crops, not employment. Early in the nation’s history, most Americans worked on farms and in fields. Today agriculture employs a minuscule fraction of the workforce, yet the United States is the world’s top exporter of food. Like the modern longing for traditional factory jobs, the disappearance of agrarian employment in late 19th-century America triggered anxiety, nostalgia, and a populist political upheaval.

But there was at least this crucial difference: No one demanded policies to “bring back” the vanished agricultural jobs. Even pandering politicians understood how ridiculous that would have been. It is just as ridiculous now to think the federal government can restore offshored manufacturing jobs that no longer suit the skills and ambitions of 21st-century Americans. Nostalgia for the past may make for great music. But as a blueprint for progress, it invariably strikes the wrong note.