An abstracted economy.
According to Bloomberg, June saw an unexpected increase in the Institute for Supply Management’s (ISM) index of non- manufacturing businesses from 59.7 in May to 60.7 June. (It had originally been forecast to drop to 58). Service now makes up 90% of the US economy.
To put it another way – doing things for people, not selling (or telling) things to people is the vast majority of enterprise in the world’s largest economy. Henry Luce dubbed the 20th, “The American Century.” It belonged to them because the U.S successfully managed a transition from an economy of things to an economy of services.
While some have speculated that the next era is an economy of ideas, I see this as a nice idea but unworkable for the foreseeable future. Ideas are kinetic or stored value. That value is released when they are implemented or executed. As a result, I believe that services will dominate the better part of the first part of this next century.