Well, it has finally been verified...

[plimsoll]

45. No, it's a different problem.

Businesses have been moving manufacturing oversees for decades because it was cheaper to build a new modern factory someplace else instead of modernizing a US based facility. That suppressed wages, and forced not only the factory workers to look for other jobs, but the technicians who maintain the equipment and eventually the engineers who design the products to look for other jobs.

Since 1995 people have been lulled by the "information society" BS, but in reality the internet wasn't used as a method of delivering information, it was a mode of entertainment delivery. If you are going to deliver entertainment then the people who produce the current entertainment are going to want in on that, and you need a mechanism to generate revenue on that delivery mode. Because the original infrastructure was developed as data systems you can harvest details about the users and use that information to tailor advertising to them. You can also use it to steer people towards the stuff you want them to see.

Since 1980 the US has been looking at the societal environment and trying to figure out how to make a buck off of some aspect of it. What we haven't done is look at the decisions and try to see where it will lead. Large numbers of the people who got to make decisions along the way were either Ayn Rand fanboys (and yes they're mostly boys) or greed narcissists, in both cases they believed that they were better than everyone else, and everyone else's only real value was to make them important. Because they were wealthy or powerful they assumed they were the geniuses, and everyone played along.

You could argue persuasively that the US doesn't really suffer from Dunning Krueger individually, but collectively, we're not really smart enough to realize that we're not that smart. It's one of the reasons that Democratic "messaging" isn't as "effective" as Republican "messaging." If you tell people unpleasant truths, enough of them will choose the self congratulatory lie that you can win elections. Lying is a winning short term strategy, but I think the consequences are really starting to bite. It would be just if you could let Republicans run the country until the wheels completely come off, but it will clearly be a disaster for mankind and responsible people don't let sociopaths run riot so the sociopaths can learn a lesson. The sociopaths won't.