It is a combination of automation, off shoring and unfettered immigration.
Of the three, automation is the most inevitable, but the off-shoring and immigration are controllable. we just chose not to do so.
As real jobs have disappeared, the Government Entitlement machine has stepped in to prop up the Economy. But there are limits to this. The entitlement clients cannot do more than simply subsist. But they DO keep consumer product and retail companies (e.g., Walmart) afloat. Many of the people getting rich are in finance or purveyors of social services.
It is really a sad situation. The people who have enabled this are nothing short of traitors, but they have been richly rewarded.
Can’t be a rich reward if (as they are also engineering) the dollar collapses and their reward is worth nothing.
I am hoping they will be hanging from lampposts and construction machinery one day.
Quite. For 40-odd years whenever I heard “automation means we can make 10x more with the same people”, I always wondered why we don’t just “make 10 times more”. Ok, It’s oversimplified. I suspect the real issue is that automation has been seen as a route to higher quarterly earnings/bonuses: “let’s make the same product with the same crappy after-sales service, same low R&D, but 10% of the labor input and pocket the difference”?. If you can combine it with offshoring, heck, why not?