Building slowly...I know I've probably said some of these same things already in this thread, but I guess I've seen this slowly building since the 80's. Here in NJ, we started to see the mass exodus of manufacturing in the 80's. That was the era of leveraged buyouts and when the guy at Coke upended the CEO pay scale. Manufacturing here moved south and west, or just closed up. Mfg. plants (and farms) were converted to malls and houses.
It seemed to accelerate in the 90's, the "service economy" and the internet bubble. In the late 90's, the real estate boom, feeding swelling housing prices. I actually predicted the mess we're in now when the Enron/Worldcom fake money thing was exposed...I thought that the confluence of that fraud with the internet bubble bursting and the stock market tanking would force people out of their overpaid jobs on Wall St. and into foreclosure, but it didn't happen.
It seems a lot of the companies that moved from this area in the 80's have gone offshore in the 00's, along with companies that had stayed. To my eye, we slowly built from a state/country/economy that made things and grew things to one that simply buys and services things. And to my mind, that just can't work. If you don't make/grow anything, you don't have anything that other countries want to buy or trade for and the numbers just don't add up.
Maybe because I've never worked in an industry that didn't make something or depend on heavy equipment, that's why I can't understand how CitiCorp can have 5 times the number of employees as GM and can't imagine what all those CitiCorp employees do...all I know is that here in the Wall St. commuter corridor those guys are the ones living in the McMansions.
PS Yes, I know we do still manufacture in this country. I'm hearing the chorus of "we still have corporate giants like GM and Intel and Dell"; well, look at some of the parts in your GM car for the "Made in China" labels, and open up your Dell computer with the motherboard from Taiwan and read the markings on the Intel chips and see where they were made. I'm not anti-foreign, I'm just pro-American manufacturing, and I remember when we were the ones who called the shots when we had all the manufacturing might and technical know-how.
We're all communicating here by virtue of the transistor, which was created not far from here at what used to be known as AT&T Bell Labs, at one time one of the foremost research centers in the world, also where the Big Bang theory was confirmed (actually at an outlying facility in Holmdel). I've seen the signs change to Lucent, and now to Alcatel (a French company), as employment has shrunk. Holmdel is long closed (
Developer to raze Bell Labs Holmdel facility, birthplace of the cellphone - Engadget ). Don't look to those places for any new transistors.