Sold out manufacturing years ago. Long term building real physical products is going to be the only value. LLMs are going to drop the price of informational value.
Building widgets is not a high-profit industry, and every country that got good at building widgets wants the high-profit industries that the US had: tech and biotech and science in general.
Not recognizing the US's massive wealth and strength, and climbing down the value chain to imitate China, is a recipe for the decline of the US, which is being followed today.
Yep. Also an issue: the high profit industries are abused by pump and dump scammers like Vivek Ramaswamy who had his doctor mother run a phase 2 clinical trial on a struggling Alzheimer's drug he bought from GlaxoSmithKline before he cashed out and it inevitably failed phase 3 trials.
We're moving in the opposite direction of ensuring that capital is allocated productively in said industries by destroying regulations and agencies like the CFPB, FTC, SEC, and by giving platforms and political power to the cheaters and fraudsters who have infested the Republican party.
Looking at the stats, we seem to be manufacturing about as much as ever in the last 30 years, and the value of that manufacturing is skyrocketing. We're certainly employing fewer people in manufacturing, but it seems to be remarkably strong still.
>LLMs are going to drop the price of informational value.
Maybe... maybe not? I'm not going to try and predict the future wrt AI, personally.
Late stage capitalism, protracted and targeted destruction of public education and health systems, lack of STEM focus eroding most of their massive lead in innovation, overemphasis on preservation and subsidisation of dying energy vs new energy (also contributing to innovation losses), overemphasis on meaningless politics and culture wars that ultimately mean absolutely nothing, excessive inequality resulting in the destruction of productivity in the lower ~50% of the wealth pyramid, over-extraction of the middle class leading to declining birth rates (increasing reliance on immigration), poorer health outcomes than other developed countries due to numerous factors (broken overly exploitive health insurance system, terrible diet/obesity, decreasing vaccination rates), toothless antitrust leading to monopolies/duopolies in most critical areas further exacerbating the rent-seeking and over-extraction, loss of soft power due to destruction of the state system under first Trump admin and continued decline due to tariffs and being an unreliable international partner.
So there isn't one reason, there is a ton of reasons.
It's not irrecoverable but it's bad. I honestly hope there is some wake-up moment for Americans when they realise that their leaders have been selling them out for decades now.
