I regularly see people comment about the decline in the importance of industrial production but I never see any data on how much it has declined.  Finally, I saw a libertarian blogger talk about as a point in his argument but he also revealed that he had not idea what had happened to industrial production relative to the economy.

The Federal Reserve actually publishes the value of industrial production as part of its monthly industrial production report, so it is quite easy to get the  raw data to construct a series of industrial production as a share of GDP. It has fallen from 33% of real GDP in 1972 — as far back as the data goes — to 23% currently. The trend is for the share to fall 2.4% annually.

Manufacturing employment has had a similar fall, from 31% to 13.7% last quarter. The employment has seen a 2.4% annual decline.