Someone raised this on another forum, almost in passing, and it's been making me think ever since.

It's fairly simplistic as a consideration, though:

Obviously 50-odd years ago 'First World' countries manufactured things but then poorer countries were able to make everything far more cheaply so we stopped and started importing a lot of goods.

That left us with I guess sort of 'middle management' and what we exported to the rest of the world was essentially computing skills wasn't it? It's just now we are moving programming offshore to those same countries...eventually they will be utterly independent of our economies, won't they?

I guess I don't really understand what makes the economy on a world scale keep ticking over, but a large section of the population are office workers and a larger section have jobs that are based on people in offices buying services from them.

Could we all end up just having to buy everything from abroad and be totally screwed? Does any of this make sense? Will we just end up with a lot of arms equipment and nothing else.

/rambling rubbish
but like, I never did Economics.