The New Economy

The Decline
Ever since the 1990's, people have been talking about the new service economy where we would no longer produce things - that would be left for laborers in foreign lands - but would provide more and more valuable services to the world in return for their manufactures.

It came to pass: now manufactures are done overseas. Many of our people are in low-paying service jobs.

The Illusion
Ben & Jerry's - and all producers of foods - constantly maintain prices by providing smaller and smaller containers of their products. Ben & Jerry's ice cream is now in slightly smaller containers, so the buyer gets less for the same mount of money.
This prevailing marketing approach underscores the fact that costs are constantly increasing, while wages are not keeping pace: if wages kept pace, we could afford more expensive ice cream. Since we cannot afford it, the ice cream container has to be modified.
This creates the illusion that things have not deteriorated for us.

The Blame
Most of our leaders have bought into this charade: do not allow the people to become aware that their lives have deteriorated to such an extent.
There was no economic imperative that demanded the change we spoke of in the 1990's: it was a conscious choice by people in position to make decisions. Certainly, they did not have the necessary imagination to see that their choices had some ghastly outcomes, but that's what happens when people of limited intellect run things.

Things could have been done differently, but we allowed the market to dictate to us what our future would be.
Let me tell you one thing: the complexity of the Free Market has only one entity it is interested in, and that is the continuity of itself. Extremely complex creations are not dead and inert, they live. However, they have no sense of morality.
We could have chosen which route to take. Look at China; it maintains a measure of human independence of the Machine of Free Marketry even as a communistic state! So the dictatorship is more free than we! That is one fine paradox.
There are no guarantees of the good intentions of complexities such as Markets. They are as benign or malign as the peoples involved in them. Recalling the history of 2008, we have absolutely no reason to be optimistic... yet.