I'm certain that it does; the argument is whether it is "bad" in a global sense. (It's bad for the US in the short term, and in the long term, we're all dead.)
The US got very good at producing food, and the result is low farm employment, low food prices, and too many monocultures and high-intensity operations that trade a few years of profits against long-term fertility. Corporations have few incentives to look many years into the future, and no incentive to clean up anything that can be externalized cheaper.
The US got very good at mechanization, and then at building tools for mechanization, and then at selling plans for building tools for mechanization... the low-wage jobs move to cheaper areas of the world.
Apple is a microcosm: what does it say on your shiny new white box? Designed in California. (Built in China, from components from Thailand and Taiwan, from materials mined all across Africa.)
But what replaces the low-wage jobs, when there are no factories, no farm jobs? Retail and service, and retail is being eaten by Walmart on one end and Amazon on the other.
It's worse than that. We "got good" at agriculture by industrializing it and concentrating most of it in arid regions.
Something like 80% of lettuce comes from the California desert and the declining water supply of the Colorado river. Much if your grain and soybean crop is being fed by groundwater in the Midwest where the aquifers are in decline. Meanwhile, prime farmland in the east is underutilized because the plots are too small. My supermarket in New York is full of Mexican and Californian tomatoes in mid august!
That's a fundamentally bad situation, and I think the potential consequences are obvious.
The US got very good at producing food, and the result is low farm employment, low food prices, and too many monocultures and high-intensity operations that trade a few years of profits against long-term fertility. Corporations have few incentives to look many years into the future, and no incentive to clean up anything that can be externalized cheaper.
The US got very good at mechanization, and then at building tools for mechanization, and then at selling plans for building tools for mechanization... the low-wage jobs move to cheaper areas of the world.
Apple is a microcosm: what does it say on your shiny new white box? Designed in California. (Built in China, from components from Thailand and Taiwan, from materials mined all across Africa.)
But what replaces the low-wage jobs, when there are no factories, no farm jobs? Retail and service, and retail is being eaten by Walmart on one end and Amazon on the other.