That's not true if you think structurally, as a percentage of the whole.
The analogy to skills is dubious. A closer parallel might be the time you spend at a given activity. If you become obsessed with your martial arts, and you quit your job without finding a way to make your kata profitable, then you would have need to worry about your finances, yes?
That clearly has not occurred, since (let me point this out one more time) we manufacture more now than ever before.
But lets run with your time analogy. We became more productive at manufacturing, and we now manufacture more stuff with less human input. Humans have been freed up to perform other useful work (services).
It's kind of like me becoming really good at my job, finishing all my work by Tuesday night, getting a pay raise, and then spending Wed-Fri at a second job (e.g., martial arts instructor). Oh noes! I hope this never happens to me!
I don't understand how you can expect this statement to carry your thesis in isolation.
Let's say you earn more money in your job than you ever have before.
Does that mean you're running "in the black"? No, because you might have also increased your expenditures out of proportion with your increase in income.
It's not enough to observe that manufacturing has increased, for imagine a country with ever-increasing manufacturing but declining exports of manufactured goods. Clearly it's possible for your observation to be true whilst not indicating a strong economy.
Again, I'm no economist, but I know enough to distrust one Pollyanna graph when I see one.
That's not true if you think structurally, as a percentage of the whole.
The analogy to skills is dubious. A closer parallel might be the time you spend at a given activity. If you become obsessed with your martial arts, and you quit your job without finding a way to make your kata profitable, then you would have need to worry about your finances, yes?