So, we've got this surplus of cash, some of it comes from the production of real stuff. A big chunk of it is printed (I'm sorry, quantitatively eased). Now we need to distribute it. What do banks and investors choose?

1. Build more stuff? Hard, slow.
2. Pass the money around and call it the "service industry"?

Why does service always win? I don't want to go into much detail like faster job creation, faster profitability, better scalability, very little physical assets, etc. There's a lot written about this. I want to approach it from a slightly different angle.

Let's outline two scenarios:

Scenario A: Imagine a highly optimized world where (one unit of work) × (one unit of knowledge) = one unit of cash. In this optimal scenario, you either increase work output or improve knowledge. There's zero politics involved.

Scenario B: In a world where cash is distributed, the only way to improve your situation is to persuade whoever is distributing the cash to give you more. Everything becomes politics.

Industrial production is much closer to A with some lobbying involved.
Majority of service industry operates much closer to B.

Hey GPT, what even is politics?

"Politics is the practice and process of influencing decisions, power dynamics, and resource distribution within any group or organization—whether in government, workplaces, or other settings. It involves negotiation, strategy, and the pursuit of interests."

We can make up rules for this passing-around game (stock buybacks, derivatives, tax optimization, and other financial magic tricks). Look, you don't even need to make a profit to be rewarded! Because you successfully shuffled money around, so you can sell your shuffling machine to others. You might say, "But my company is making real money." YES, congrats, you just won your slice of pie in a fake system that is not grounded in anything real. Mind that there's also a blurry line between industries that generate value and those that are made up. Walmart sells real products, but what about corporate offices?
I'm trying to simplify a messy system, but hopefully you get the main idea:
When money is unbound, we have scenario B, and politics always wins.

In a complex system, politics is a gridlock of game-theory incentives.
Just a quick recap of how we play the game within the companies:
1. Make things around you more complicated, that increases your power.
2. Recruit more people to form alliances.
3. Signals, signals everywhere. Pointless artifacts > outcome.

It's okay. Businesses are fine, they'll collapse, get acquired, split. But the system keeps growing.
The biggest problem I see is that we don't isolate this made-up virtual game system. It spills into the real economy, and it's making everything… worse.
Please, at least isolate the theater, if you really need to keep it up.

Now, I let's go to the promised baby-making.
Think about it: we shoved women into this university → fake job pipeline.
We made them a big player in this game. They are disproportionately represented. Now they're exchanging husbands for bosses. Chasing that local HR manager girlboss dream, even though it means absolutely nothing for the economy, it is just success within the system.
The U.S. service sector is at least partly contributing to the productivity of other sectors, thanks to software domination (coincidentally, a male-dominated industry).
But look at places with the lowest birth rates: South Korea, Singapore, Japan. They can't make software. Most of their service industry is just… fake.
We are committing this civilization suicide for nothing…