The context of the person you replied to was: > Our currency loses value because too much of the economy is constituted by unproductive jobs where people just

The context of the person you replied to was: > Our currency loses value because too much of the economy is constituted by unproductive jobs where people just attend to each other instead of creating any value. Which is a broad enough context for my point. The incredible inefficiency of the U.S. economy means that it is not providing the quality of life to its people that our per-capita economic activity suggests that it should be. In the aggregate, there's a lot of people paying a lot of money and getting a crappy life in return. That manifests itself in, among others, physical/mental health problems, constant economic precarity, overconsumption of natural resources, degradation of public services, profligate time-wasting, frustration with each other and one's self, and unachieved potential. And those things put the U.S. on the path to long-term decline. After you account for externalities, and the fact that much of American economic activity would not exist if it simply had a better-structured society to begin with, the amount of value it actually creates starts to look a lot lower.