Taurisk hi
Long time no see (hear?)
I think we err in our historicity (is that a word) we look back a lot... as are awful at predicting the future. In fact there's a Candian Professor Tetlock now quite famous, who has made 'prediction' his pet project, and his life time 'Opus'. And he points out that we a re simply awful predictors. He has measured this, and tested it too.
Particularly so for the knowledgeable pundits', particularly the talking heads we see on politics & economics; something were prognosis and projections can be measured, and measure Tetlock does. (I believe sportscasters are better at predicting soccer games?)
So I am well advised not to go, were the angels have been showed to stuff up so badly.
I think it was Buffett too, who said it was harder to predict what business would succeed into the future, than what it was to predict what successful businesses that exist today - would fail in the future!.
So take what I say will all the disrespect and irreverence that you can muster, because I will be wrong!
But their is a slice of history that does seem to go to exactly your thoughts, and that is the effect the combustion engine or car & truck, had on society just over a hundred plus years ago. In the 1870's odd (and I don't have the exact figures) but something like 60% of the United States' workforce was actively working in agriculture, all just to feed America. And that workforce was not that good at it, because there was no cold storage nor trucks to take produce vast distances to the best competitive markets, nor the processes to preserve food. So every 7 or 8 years very real and serious shortages occurred.
Starvation stuff...
By the 1910's that 60% fell below 20%, before the war it fell to below 10%, and now, today the US farm worker is I believe something like 3% of the United States work force.
Two things
i) that 3% produces more than something like 500% more than the 60% did, more reliably, and more market effectively. There is choice, that never existed. Farm produce in the 1870's was cotton, tobacco, maise and oats. You could have porridge for breakfast, corn pone for lunch, and a good smoko in the afternoon. Once a month a pig, or cow was slaughtered. Not much else...
ii) the difference between the 60% - 3% i.e. the 57% of the American Workforce left the land, and never looked back. In the 60 years the United States urbanised, and work and skills & services emerged, that nobody in the 1870's would have dreamed of. It was beyond the realm of Jules Verne. And yet the American Weberian work ethic sustained, in fact it blossomed anew, and that, meant the city folk worked as long as, and as hard as, and more prosperously as ever.
Furthermore I don't think industrialisation is over, as Scooby suggests. We still need cars, and trucks, ships, and air conditioners, and all the stuff the industrialised WEST once produced. It hasn't gone. But the WEST has allowed the comparative advantage to flow beyond its immediate borders. Much in an active sense of goodwill, as the US stimulated Germany & Japan after the war. The US could have prevented both Germany & Japan's advancement, and held onto the auto monopoly they had after WWII, and then Japan and Germany realised how to sustain that advantage, by their country's bigger propensity to save and accumulation capital, at a time when Americans were actively encourage to develop a propensity to consume.
In another gesture trade tariffs were abandoned in 1960's -> one way or another, which suited the US as they then exported way, way more than they imported.
That has played out into the 'china syndrome' where China simply continued to do what Germany & Japan had learned to do so well. China learned fast...
I think the WEST can regain 'its economic turf' because internationalism has sadly turned into a one way street, for the US. as the TRUMP victory shows. But i.m.h.o. it will require a few changes i) tariffs, ii) minimum wages to be abolished (hear the roar) iii) the US to foster a propensity to save, again. Remember the economic trilemma, this strategy would go all these competing goals, (stable / floating currency & free(?) trade, monetary control of the USD$ capital flows)
So ...
Yours is a big question.
And my words, tho' many are way too few
g' nite
