I see a funny pattern here.

England created the Industrial Revolution but barely has any manufacturing these days.

The U.S. created several industries (mass car manufacturing, electronics, clothing, etc) but today China produces more than them. They had more than half the worlds' GDP in 1944, they have less than 16% today. They're slowly following England's path.

That's the "Cantillon Effect"[1]

  Cantillon suggested that inflation occurs gradually and that the new supply of money has a localised effect on inflation, effectively originating the concept of non-neutral money. Furthermore, he posited that the original recipients of new money enjoy higher standards of living at the expense of later recipients. The concept of relative inflation, or a disproportionate rise in prices among different goods in an economy, is now known as the Cantillon effect.

If the US had competent leadership, they could re-shore things, and benefit from China's upcoming collapse.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Cantillon#Monetary_the...

It's just the path of economic development, and the benchmark for "comfortable life" is set by ambient economy of where you live.

So once the ambience reaches a level of "advanced degrees and massively leveraged worker impact" it becomes almost impossible to live in that environment on the level of "some school and hand knitting a scarf a day." It's totally intractable when you are competing with someone who generates a scarf of value every 30 seconds.

China has 4x the population of the US, so it's not exactly odd that they would produce more than the US.