Americans work long hours, with good skills and fine tools. That the results aren't all that great is a function of how the whole thing is organized. We've slipped from an Economy that's a function of human activity trying to support ourselves, into servants of a dystopian, dysfunctional cult of the Invisible Hand.
This isn't a new idea - Kunstler writes a column on it every week. I've tried to put some numbers to the problem. How much of what we do goes straight down ratholes? How much would we be better off not doing at all?
Some of the major areas where we're organized to fail are:
War machine - In 2008, $573 billion was spent by the US on "defense"
Prison/industrial complex- The $200 billion a year we spend on law enforcement & imprisonment of 2.5 million people is at least half waswte, plus the waste of time & lives.
Pure overhead - Some institutions - particularly universities, are ever expanding cost pools with less and less devoted to their supposed mission. Only 1/3 of the employees of higher education are faculty, and of those, very little time is spent with students. Which is how tuition has soared.
Overpaid executives - now that 120% of our income goes to the highest paid 2%, can anybody still pretend it represents a valid distribution?
The Underpaid - a lot of people are paid too little to live on. But they live. All sorts of bad stuff going on..
Health denial industry- At least a trillion wasted a year
Disinformation - Wingnut welfare recipients may not take in that much directly, but keeping the country from dealing with obvious problems in sensible ways has a huge cost.
Unnecessary services - God forbid you have to make your own coffee
Commuting - The waste of land & time in how we're distributed is immense
Hucksters & hustlers - such as psychics & therapists & mortgage brokers & strategic consultants & gypsies have been around for thousands of years. They must be filling a need, even though there's no way to know what it is.
At some point, most of you will have said "Hey! Thats my job!" Which is nothing new. (Even Archie Bunker lost his job on the loading dock when somebody realized she could drive a forklift onto the truck.)
But it's time. Time to cut a bit into the waste, rechannel the loads & benefits into more production & less time wasted. Time to end the 3 hour commutes & 60 hour weeks.
Because once we knock out the easy $2 trillion in waste, the US has some major competitive strengths. Agriculture & manufacturing, at least in the production area, are extremely productive (other than that whole refusal to go metric thing). Where we do something needful, we do it very well. Tax refunds now arrive in a few days. Banks are accurate & fast. Could the Indian civil service or Japanese banks compete with that efficiency?