In my European country we prefer to refer to a service economy as a "knowledge economy", pretending that the value added by people in the tertiary sector is actually produced by our elite monopoly on knowledge, which we acquired by paying a lot of money to go to college for four years. However, regardless of whatever Western country you might live in, chances are you're not producing anything that the rest of the world really needs. We produce things that we manage to fool each other into believing are worth something. A cup of coffee for which you pay ten dollar because the barista is willing to strike up smalltalk with you is the oil of our economy.
Considering that Americans spend 15% of their GDP on healthcare, and yet have a life expectancy lower than that of the South Koreans who spend just 6.5%, it should be clear that Americans don't deliver a superior product in this regard. American health care is not state of the art and your frequent doctor visits don't lead you to superior health. In a culture that sees "job creator" as a honorific rather than as an insult, sickness is a product that can be turned into a profit and keep the economy running. If doctors started preventing illness and pharmaceuticals stopped causing side-effects that lead to the need for more treatment, the economy would not survive as people would lose their jobs. Poor health has become an expression of patriotism, as every new roll of fat we grow keeps hardworking American doctors, dietitians, insurance salesmen and gym owners employed. The war on terror has accomplished its objective and should be superseded by a war on fruit and vegetables.
We in the West might consider ourselves creators of culture, our most insidious export product to the rest of the world, but that too is of limited duration. We might think that we can sustain an entire creative class of hipsters because one out of every thousand has a drug trip that leads them to produce some new genre of music or art house film that we can export to the third world, but they're not particularly interested in funding our insanity and bourgeois ennui.
We might consider ourselves cultural leaders, but the third world has no motive to keep our self-imposed illusion going. Chinese people are capable of dancing around in ridiculous costumes on stage and singing sentimental love songs too, they don't need us for that. We don't have to export the fictionalized relationship drama of upper class Brooklynite women in their twenties to China either, as they themselves are perfectly capable of coming up with relationship drama of rich young daughters of party officials living in Beijing or Shanghai.
The emperor has no clothes. Our service economies are little more than a hot potato game of white people serving each other coffee, legal advice to deal with the complex laws we set up for ourselves, mortgages, education, insurances and medical care, until the developing world figures out that they don't really have a good reason to keep our busywork going and reinforcing our purchasing power by buying dollars and debt anymore and decide to crash our economy.
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accountt1234 [link] [38 comments]