A good deal of manufacturing was outsourced to cheap wage locations in the "underdeveloped" world, leading some parochially minded Westerners to conclude that heavy industry had disappeared from the planet altogether.

[...] What bred the culture of postmodernism, with its dismissal of so-called grand narratives and triumphal announcement of the End of History, was above all the conviction that the future would now be simply more of the present. [...]