At the heart of the Trump administration’s policies is one overarching goal: in Vice President JD Vance’s words from a speech this week, it is to stage the “great American manufacturing comeback.” Donald Trump believes that the key to transforming the United States along the lines that he wants — economically, socially and politically — is to revive the factories and foundries across this country. Unfortunately, not only is it highly unlikely to happen, but the efforts to move in this direction will be costly and damaging for Americans.

The idea that America should make more things is a seductive one. We all think of a rich and powerful country as one with huge factories belching smoke, churning out stuff and selling it to the world. It is deeply imprinted in our minds. But it is an image of the past, not the future. The most advanced economies in the world today are almost all dominated by services. Services account for the vast majority of jobs in the world’s richest industrialized countries. In the U.S., services account for more than 80% of all nonfarm jobs. Manufacturing is less than 10%. America’s distinctive exports to the world are software and software services, entertainment, financial services, and other such intangible things — and in these, the U.S. runs not a trade deficit but a surplus with the rest of the world.

Why this transformation? Because, as people get richer and better educated, they spend more money on services and not goods. In 1960, U.S. consumers allotted more than 50% of their consumption spending to goods. By 2010, it was only 33%. And the money for companies is not in goods but services. A sneaker might cost 25 or 30 dollars to make; the value is in the design, marketing and sales that allows you to sell it for $100. Which part of this product would you rather your workers be involved in?

Over the past 40 or 50 years, manufacturing as a share of the total economy and manufacturing jobs as a share of total jobs have steadily declined in almost all advanced industrial countries. U.S. manufacturing jobs made up around 25% in 1973. Today, they make up about 8%. You see very similar declines in Britain, Canada, and even places that were traditional manufacturing strongholds, such as Germany, France and Japan.

Japan is particularly important as a case study because it did pretty much everything that Trump wishes that the U.S. had done over the past 60 years. It protected its domestic market from foreign goods through high tariffs and other barriers. The government pursued an aggressive industrial policy, society venerated manufacturing, and the educational system prized technical skills and shop work. And yet, manufacturing declined steadily in Japan.

It’s actually not right to say “and yet.” One could easily make the case that many Japanese industries declined because of these policies. Government bureaucrats favored certain sectors — such as VHS tape recorders and Walkman-style audio players — and missed the technological shifts that rendered them obsolete. Huge levels of corruption within the ruling elites ensured that firms were favored for political reasons. Most important, the tariffs and other barriers kept Japanese companies shielded from competition. Those decisions and others led Japan — far from dominating the world economically as Trump had imagined in the 1980s — to enter into a decades-long stagnation that it has now barely emerged from.

Countries such as Japan and Germany that tried hard to boost their manufacturing sectors, and countries such as France and Italy that protected their workers through tight labor laws, all saw their manufacturing decline. But they also missed out on the growing service sector that now dominates the world economy. Germany, the world’s third-largest economy, has almost no great companies in the digital world — unless you count one 50-year-old, second-tier software firm, SAP.

The U.S. was more open and thus more innovative. As Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the head of the World Trade Organization, has said, America has quietly become the dominant player in the service economy, generating $1 trillion of services that it exports. She points out that professional and business service jobs pay an average of $43.60 per hour in the U.S. compared with $34.83 for the average manufacturing job. So forget the misty nostalgia about manufacturing. The hard reality is that services is the fastest-growing sector in the world economy, generating higher profits and good jobs.

The effort to revive manufacturing via protectionism is an effort to defy basic economics. In a free market, people and countries are forced to specialize, moving to those things they can do best. I quoted Vance earlier from a speech he gave at the American Dynamism Summit. In it, he explained that the Trump administration would use tariffs to protect domestic industries but promised them tax breaks and government support to innovate. But the long history of capitalism tells us that countries and companies don’t innovate because of tax credits and depreciation. They do so because of competition. That is why markets work: They force efficiency. If you shield U.S. companies and workers from competition, you will get not dynamism but stagnation.

Email: fareed.zakaria.gps@turner.com.