> It boggles the mind that anyone could have believed that replacing many of the core productive bits of the economy with fluff like management (and ownership), finance, and hospitality would lead to anything but weakness.

When the decision is largely made by the managerial and financier classes...

All of the "smartest people in the room" come through economics educations based on pat 2-line graphs and ricardian tables that make extremely grand claims about the world, and they all come out thinking the same way. They're not trying to be crooked, they're repeating what they were taught.