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We're very smart and we manage stuff. We don't want to manufacture anything any more. We will sell and manage the money and the resources of the world.
Look at LJ. He doesn't manufacture anything, but he produces wealth by managing risk of future earnings for productive people. In doing that, he is part of a massive system of generation of wealth. The transportation that people use are made as cheap and as available as possible. That generates wealth when they use that transportation to get to work etc.
In the old USSR, the party line was, isn't it amazing how a house can be bought and sold in the USSR for the same price as it is in the US. See how we are the same, they said. But what they lacked was a mortgage system to get people into those houses, so of course nobody could actually afford them. We developed this approach to managing money and wealth and risk over time. That takes a remarkable system, smart managers, etc.
The truth is, though, we don't really know how this is all going to play out. But nobody in the 1950s could have imagined a world in which we don't actually make most the things we own and use and such, and we are moving towards that.
When Whitney invented the cotton gin there were people who protested furiously because it would put the cotton workers out of work. Well it sure did, but now suddenly cotton was easier to process, which meant it was cheaper, which meant that the whole nation got cheaper clothes, which meant the whole nation was richer, which produced economic growth to replace those cotton-pickin' jobs.
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