[Amezarak]

> The rest of the world settled on putting the center of technology and arts and media and finance in the US, to hugely lucrative benefits for the US, with liberal free trade and IP protections and patent monopolies and a very healthy profit for Americans,

The US is still the world's #2 manufacturer and it's still one of the biggest parts of the economy; 10x more people are employed in manufacturing than in the information sector. Moreover, manufacturing has been in a steep decline since the 1990s. The "romance" is people remembering well-paying jobs for people who are not interested in or cannot do tech, arts, media, or finance.

Centering your economy on those things deliberately would also be very foolish. Besides the fact you end up with a few urban cores with the rest of the country hollowed out (like the UK has seen), they are all things that are very easy to shift to other countries if there's a small cultural wind change - Hollywood especially is not in a great position in terms of "enduring global market titan."

At any rate it's absurd to say it's over and people should just give up on something that to this day employs so many people.