The whole economic landscape of the us is artifical. As in what survives and thrives does not need to provide any value, but need only have political connections, to remove competition and be good enough to supress all alternatives.

The oil and gas industry survives and dictates policy not because its very influential- its simply the economic backbone of the empire via the petrodollar. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrodollar

And the people life in de-concentrated large scale villages instead of cities, because the empire is in no need to tax economic activities such as moving large distances via driving a car efficiently. So the government, cursed with the ressource curse of beeing able to sell security outside of the us- pacifies the population with economic presents, which are often just frozzen in time retro trinkets.

One can not derive any political and economic lessons from such a strange diorama.

There is no incentive