> That means wealth-creation is possible in an economy based largely on services. How so? The service economy is basically masturbatory. I can trade my servi

> That means wealth-creation is possible in an economy based largely on services. How so? The service economy is basically masturbatory. I can trade my services for your services, around and around, but at the end of the day we both still need to eat. We need to put gas in our cars. We need medical supplies and all sorts of other consumables. If we have a 'service economy' where all we do is sell services to each other, and buy all the real physical stuff from abroad, we're going to be in big trouble. This seems to be exactly the situation that the U.S. is in. Yes, we still have something of a manufacturing industry but it's not producing enough to offset our imports. We've gotten away with it for a few decades because other countries are willing to send us useful stuff in exchange for Treasury notes, but that doesn't seem exactly sustainable. Unless we can make the 'service economy' into something that essentially replaces exports (selling services abroad), I don't see how we can avoid going broke. And selling services abroad is a lot more tricky and much less stable than grinding out widgets and packing them into a shipping container. It doesn't seem like we have much of a plan, moving forward. About the only good thing that I can see is that we still produce much of our own food, so that we probably won't starve if the rest of the world decides to stop sending us manufactured goods in exchange for worthless slips of paper. It'll be a lot of white bread, corn chips, orange juice, and peanut butter, though.