AT&T was broken up in 1982. Our manufacturing peaked around 1990 and what really pushed it downward was China joining the WTO. We also halted a lot of fab construction domestically after the GFC of '08.
This is an interesting theory, but US manufacturing output actually peaked ~2022-2024.
US wages paid to manufacturing jobs are going down year-over-year, because of automation, and, uh, other factors. But the amount of products that are produced has grown year over year... Or was growing, until waves at everything in 2025.
To the contrary AT&T proved itself incapable of delivering end-to-end innovation. Sure it lowered the cost of intercity links for long-distance calls dramatically but couldn’t pass savings on to the consumer. Picturephone was a technical tour de force but demonstrated AT&T couldn’t deliver new services other than little things like call waiting and caller id.
Notably high profits from long-distance dialup calls kept online services stuck at 2400 bps for most of the 1980s. Futurists circa 1960-1970 thought online services were going to become widespread about 15 years than they really did and AT&T was the #1 thing to blame.
