We bought in hard into this myth that the service-based economy is the next evolutionary step above the manufacturing economy. So we sold our industries to Asia

We bought in hard into this myth that the service-based economy is the next evolutionary step above the manufacturing economy. So we sold our industries to Asia for cheap cash and cheap consumables, completely kicking out our foundation from under us. Meanwhile, the moat around Silicon Valley is proving to be much less wide and deep than believed, and, for instance, easily defeated by Chinese policies (see Zuckerberg's pathetic grovelling at the feet of Xi). I mostly blame the growing popularity of "MBA wisdom" where short-term extraction of value is sold as growth and fundamentals are almost completely ignored. Companies focused on producing good quality products and careful innovation can't even survive in our market. The worst thing I think is how much "oral tradition" of institutional knowledge we've had to have lost in the past several decades.