Too many arrows and not enough olives

The US with a population approaching 300 million has only 10 million production workers. That means Americans are consuming the products of other countries labor. In the 21st century the US economy has been unable to create jobs in export and import-competitive industries. US job growth is confined to nontradable domestic services. This movement of the American labor force toward Third World occupations in domestic services has dire implications both for US living standards and for America's status as a superpower. Toward the end of the 20th century three developments came together that are rapidly moving high productivity, high value-added jobs that pay well away from the US to Asia: the collapse of world socialism, which vastly increased the supply of labor available to US capital; the rise of the high speed Internet; the extraordinary international mobility of US capital and technology.

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