In that light, Apple CEO Tim Cook’s promise this week to invest more than $100 million to move production for one of its Mac lines to the U.S. next year sounds paltry.

But even such a small sum could signal something much bigger for the U.S. economy: namely, that moving manufacturing jobs back from China to the U.S. is starting to make financial sense.

For more than a dozen years, Apple has relied on a “designed in the U.S., made in China” strategy. That’s chiefly because the cost of labor in China is so much cheaper. This simple reality has shifted the globe’s economic center of gravity over the past decade