What are seeing isn&#x27;t a shift to the service economy but a shift to the automation and digitalization economy. In other words and to paraphrase – It&#x27;s the technology stupid!<p>Look at any sector and you will see that the only way to further improve production-output is to add more technology or artificial enhancements, which means slowly; less and less; jobs for everyone.<p>Now if the price on all products and services went down at the same time as the number of jobs are disappearing and the wages goes down, we wouldn&#x27;t have any issues.<p>But the problem is that urbanization pushes prices up and so even though production gets cheaper and cheaper, the cost of living still seems to be going up which means we will need to digitalize even more to make up for it. But that takes time and in the meantime millions and millions of people in the west are loosing any ability to participate in the job-market because they aren&#x27;t just competing against each other or outsourcing but everyone is competing against automation and digitalization.<p>This global slowdown is different because the shift to the service economy in China means that production have no other way to go than automation which means you won&#x27;t have the benefits of humans getting jobs and therefore become part of the global economy.<p>Instead wealth goes to those who own the robots and Marx although wrong in most things, was finally right about something :)