America’s service sector makes up the majority of the economy. As shown by this map, our GDP is almost entirely made up of Service, rather than Agriculture or Industry. The Service Industry is technically called the Tertiary sector of the economy – where industry and manufacturing is the Secondary sector, and Agriculture and extraction is the Primary sector of the economy. Our service sector is basically made up of entertainment, food preparation, banking, retail sales, healthcare, government, education, etc.
This neither a “good” nor a “bad” thing, from my point of view, it is just a “thing”. This all comes back to the economic principle of comparative advantage. Although we as a country may be better at extracting resources from the ground as opposed to other countries, we choose instead, to move our resources to these service industries, because we are comparatively much, much better at doing this, compared to other countries.
Therefore, I think cries to bring industry and manufacturing jobs back home from overseas are heartfelt, but misled. As a country, if we spend our resources (labour, education, …) on these secondary, or primary sectors of the economy, we have to take them away from the service sector. It’s simply inefficient.