[fastball]

Yes, I think the correlation between MBA popularity as a degree and failing of US industry is fairly causal.

It's the same in universities, where more and more time and money is spent on "management" (extracting value) and less and less is spent on actually teaching stuff (creating value).

Unsurprisingly, when a (somewhat large) portion of the population in a high productivity society realizes they can just skim off the top without doing any actually useful work, bad things happen.