Modern economies have grown in three stages: agrarian, industrial, and service. Agrarian economies were the first in human history to develop, supplying the basic resources for civilization. They thrived for centuries before technological advancements in the West allowed for industrial economies to take shape. This also created a boon for education, which skyrocketed after the Industrial Revolution. Industrial economies grew so fast that it wasn't long before service economies like ours came to center stage. Once all that technology made goods easier to manufacture, many people didn't need to work in factories anymore. They'd migrated from the country, an agrarian region; to the cities, denser areas of industry; and thence to the urban sprawl, areas of the economy that are service based.
Suburbia is overflowing with strip malls that offer nothing but services, and its population has not stopped increasing since it gathered a firm footing in the 1950s. This is the hot spot of the consumer age, a place where middle class families can buy everything they want at the nearest convenient store. The Industrial Age and all the technology that came with it made everything so easy for us that it devalued the gold standard, creating cryptocurrencies of paper money that were easy to manipulate by stock brokers, bankers, and CEOs. The result was a widening in the gap between rich and poor, breaking a false sense of faith in the fairness of a free market economy.
Social market economies seem to be working best. Many countries in Europe use a mixture of capitalism and socialism to find a balance between the free market and all the inequality that comes with it (unfair wages, working hours, health hazards). To a lesser extent the U.S. does this as well, although its policies have not done as well to keep its classes within reasonable distance of each other. The result is a dangerous squeeze, where the lower class ends up working just as hard as they would in an agrarian or industrial economy. You may have wondered at some point in your life why all this technology is supposed to make life easier for us, yet we are more fast-paced and stressed than ever. One explanation is that we are consuming products at a greater rate than ever before, but that doesn't seem like enough. Another is that the upper class has taken advantage of a capitalist-heavy system that transfers all the benefits that technology gives us right into their bank accounts.
You can see this by following any trail of efficiency, from agrarian to industrial to service economies. Service economies cannot function on their own. Agrarian and industrial economies still exist, they've just gotten pushed out of the country to make room for this new revolutionary type. The Midwest U.S. still has an agrarian economy, but it's inhabited by many poor farmers who oddly elect people whose job is to keep the poor man down, reinforcing the pattern. You may still find industries in the U.S., though many of these have been exported overseas. This wasn't done by accident. The intent was to distance as much primitive labor as possible from our utopian suburbs, our consumer-friendly sprawls of paradise. Agrarian and industrial economies do not bring in as much money as service ones, it's that simple. Bypassing them helps many of the top companies in the country sidestep the grueling processes of digging up materials and manufacturing them by outsourcing it to others.
The adverse effect of a service economy is that it devalues education. Nobody in the service industry really needs a college degree, just a well-rounded knowledge about the type of products a company is selling. Back in the Industrial Age, people needed degrees because many of the logistics in manufacturing required years of study. This may be why tuition rates are rising while literacy is falling. Frankly it doesn't appear that a service economy has made us more cordial either, judging from some of the service I've received. There was a time when people who weren't cut out for customer service didn't feel the pressure of a surplus market for service jobs. The decline in quality service is ironically a consequence of an economy that's supposed to elevate it.
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