Reminds me of my favorite quote from The Wire:
"We used to make shit in this country; build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy's pocket"
But economic growth can't plausibly come from creating ever more things, and the obsession with stuff is crazy talk. Delivering services is definitely the thing a modern economy should aspire to. Leave the making of shit to the robots and other countries, with whom you shouldn't even want to compete. It's just nostalgia.
EDIT: To elaborate on my point, the article mentions the desire for meaningful work. I would guess in the past most physical objects are created to serve a very concrete, real human need. But many services seem to be about coming up with ways to convince people to part with their money, often just creating and then "servicing random desires." So such work might not feel very meaningful at all. Hence, having to work such a job in order to get money for the things we actually need (and are already capable of producing for everyone) feels very artificial.
Of course this is not strictly a property of services. Today we also produce lots of gadgets and widgets and nonsense that aren't in any way relevant to our needs.
This is like the article that bitches about engineers making Snapchat instead of working on Healthcare.gov
There is a massive implication in what you are saying and in that article that stuff like Snapchat is trivial and useless. People forget that being a human being is an emotional experience, and that while we require food, shelter etc., to live, in order to truly live we require much more. Snapchat, gadgets and widgets and nonsense? These are all crucial parts of human emotional existence.
Now I have to admit to owning some gadgets myself, but few of these would I consider crucial to my existence, emotional or not. Very very few of them have any impact on my daily life. And if I could choose to have fewer gadgets but more free time (with less spent on doing things I consider meaningless), I would do so. It would be nicer still if the people around me could make the same choice.
I would argue that our emotional existence could improve if it wasn't a necessity to sell it to each other. It's a cultural and social thing, something you can do in your free time.
Yes they were (as well as for many other reasons).
Imagine a cancer patient hooked up to all the crucial life saving equipment that the engineers who did not choose "frivolity" in their careers built. What is that patient doing? They are on their iPhones, on twitter, on Snapchat etc. And these products are really really making a difference in their lives. In being able to not feel so isolated. Until you've seen something like this happen, it's very easy to dismiss these products as stupid cat picture networks. But sometimes cat picture networks really make people feel better, and that's kind of what it's all about.
I just think people frequently criticize others' non-infrastructure work as "frivolous," forgetting that the point of infrastructure is to support a life that is fun and feels good.
I wouldn't get too hung up on physical things. Writing is an act of creation, but the product isn't physical. Same for software, or music, or films or television, theater, and so on. Service occupations from waiter to teacher can be seen as creation of experience, creation of value, creation of potential. Even a political campaign creates an organization, loaded with new associations and connections.
I can see how those acts of creation are distinct from many of the financial games ("...our hand in the next guy's pocket") that make headlines, games which don't seem to create anything at all.
I didn't even see that show, but I think I understand what the quote must have meant in context.
Oh, and not even programming is safe. Programmers spend ridiculous amounts of time working on new tools and languages to automate the repetitive parts of their jobs and increase their expressive power and code reuse.
My theory is that the next giant hit will come to engineers in all areas. Once software gets to the point that it can automate dishwashing, serving, driving, retail and all those other service jobs in a super efficient manner, it will be able to automate engineering without the need for the extra hardware to physically do a job. All they'll need is a set of sensors, computer and a printer to send the construction/design/etc. blueprints to.
When I went to college, the message was 'go to college'. Now, the message is 'go to college to be an engineer'. We've seen how well the flat message of college is going for many, many people with, for all intents and purposes, unmarketable degrees.
It just makes too much sense that this will happen in engineering in the next twenty years. I work at a college now, the swing that direction has started, you watch, I'd put money that I'm right.
He's lamenting what society has become post-1980(ish), in which economic inequality is so high that corruption dominates effort.
Making profit and serving your fellow man are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they are more likely to be mutually inclusive.