This thread is becoming bizarre. I'm not sure what the point of it is anymore. What got everything really going was the question of "economic power" (which I think is a highly subjective concept) and whether the US has it or not because it's economy is increasingly "service" (another variable term that has a lot of problems) oriented.

Fuchs,

While an interesting discussion so far, I'm not really sure what your point is. It seems you are saying that the US lacks "economic power" because the US economy is becoming more "service" based. I disagree with that general conclusion along with many of your supporting arguments, which I won't spend the time to belabor here, but more importantly, I think we probably fundamentally disagree on what "economic power" is.

Long ago, agriculture was economic power. With the industrial revolution, industry became the primary source of economic power. My view is that we are in the midst of another revolution - one that won't be complete for quite some time. Industry remains relevant, but grows a bit less important each year. At some point, maybe in a century, industry will probably look a lot like agriculture does today - highly efficient, automated and therefore requiring very little labor. If this is indeed the case, then where are people going to work? How are they going to earn a living? They'll have "brain" and service jobs.

And that's really one source of the so-called "decline" in industry and manufacturing. In real terms, both have actually increased fairly steadily in the US during the last 50 years, not decreased. What has decreased is the labor required. Like agriculture before it, the amount of labor required has dropped and is continuing to drop. That labor has to go somewhere and the simple fact is that much of it goes to the service sector. Many of the graphs here may be instructive. The fact that those huge increases in productivity allow growth in other areas is a strength, not a weakness, IMO.

You seem to hold China up as some kind of industrial powerhouse. I suppose if your measure is plastic toys, clothes and toaster-ovens (as opposed to aircraft engines, for example) you might be right. However, if the global economy collapses tomorrow, I think it will be much easier for the US to go back to making it's own toasters than it will be for China to make it's own jet engines. So while your comparison of industrial capacity by various measures may be true on a macro level, its irrelevant in terms of "power" unless other factors are considered.

Your argument also neglects raw material and energy dependency - the EU, for example, is highly dependent on imported energy and raw materials to make steel - much more so than the United States. One might therefore argue that the US steel industry is more resilient than EU's when all factors are considered.

All this isn't to suggest that all is well in the US. The decline in Americans studying science and engineering is much more worrisome to me than not being the best in steel or shipbuilding or most anything else you and others have mentioned.