Most computer chips aren’t made in the US, and the wires on the transistors are a tenth of a micron wide, and that isn’t tolerance, that is the whole width. Therefore, I don’t really buy that precision parts will remain the domain of the US. Traditional manufacturing, even high-quality, will continue to leave.

So where do we go from here? I don’t know. We tried to transition to an economy with a large financial sector, but that didn’t turn out so well. Plus, in the end, it’s still just overhead.

We are pretty on top of biotechnology, nanotechnology, etc., so as long as we continue to invent new things and push the envelope, maybe we can continue to have jobs creating cool gadgets and nano-robots that heal us from the inside. Then again, we have started to pull back from STEM funding and science is to be ridiculed, so maybe we won’t be the ones inventing all that cool stuff.

Maybe, in the end, the country will evolve/devolve (depending on your point of view) to the 1890’s, and we will all become subsistence farmers on some small plot of land in Appalachia.