At some point in the last decade, the United States just stopped growing. From 2000 to 2010, very few jobs were created, and it was the first decade on record where the number of private-sector jobs actually shrank. The typical family got no economic boost at all from 2000 to 2010. There was no appreciation in home prices and zero gains in stocks, when averaged across all Americans.

Of course, this zero growth is an average. In Silicon Valley, plenty of new millionaires and billionaires were minted from 2000 to 2010, and many more will continue to be minted in the future. The point isn’t that no one in the United States made money; it’s that those wins were the exceptions, and they came at the expense of so many others losing money.

In the corporate sphere, the post-2000 recovery was largely a jobless one, lead by huge gains in productivity. With rare exceptions like Google, Silicon Valley’s great public company–generating machine all but ground to a halt, and the US went through a sizable shift in its collective corporate culture, where layoffs were no longer a move of last resort, but a regular way to meet earnings estimates for even highly profitable companies.

Meanwhile, workers’ output was continually squeezed, without much wage appreciation. From 2000 to 2005, the median hourly pay adjusted for inflation declined, according to the Economic Policy Institute, as worker productivity rose, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. By 2006, wages were at their lowest share of gross domestic product on record, whereas corporate profits were at their highest share in nearly 50 years, according to the Department of Commerce.

There are only so many hours you can pry out of US workers, however, and there is only so little you can pay them. That’s where outsourcing and the emerging world came in. It seemed too good to be true: high-quality workers who were happy to work long hours for a fraction of the cost. And thanks to the Internet, people argued that a globally flung, outsourced company could function as one tight organization.

Business professors like David B. Yoffie of Harvard Business School argued that we weren’t outsourcing anything of value, as the United States was becoming more of a high-margin service economy. The high-value intellectual work — whether design, strategy or engineering — was all still being done here. If you could get the low-value work done elsewhere at a fraction of the price, how was that a bad thing? Some pundits even argued that these companies were helping humanity by giving poor people in the emerging world comfortable, comparatively high-paying jobs.

Of course, like most things taught at business school, parts of this ideology are true, and parts only look good on paper.

“The prevailing view of the past 25 years has been that the US can thrive as a center of innovation and leave the manufacturing of products it invents and designs to others,” wrote Gary P. Pisano of Harvard Business School. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”

There were two big gaps in this reasoning. The first is that manufacturing couldn’t be cleanly divorced from invention — it’s the cycle of making things that spawns new ideas for how things can be made better. By not making anything anymore, the United States is losing touch with how to invent.

The second problem was that the emerging world wasn’t just full of people who were only good at answering phones or low-level assembly, any more than all Americans were good at being big-idea visionaries like Steve Jobs. Pisano writes, “All this assumes your manufacturing partner is content to subsist on your table scraps. But what if they have their eye on the prime rib, too? Well, once they have learned to manufacture your product (and your ability to manufacture has eroded), they are in a much better position to move up the food chain into manufacturing and designing more sophisticated components and subsystems and, eventually, the entire product.”

Put more crassly — the world wasn’t full of grunts who would be forever grateful for the United States’ grunt work. The idea that China, India and other areas of Southeast Asia would blithely recognize the United States’ right to dominate intelligent, highly valued labor was at best naive and at worst racist. Ironically, in trying to use the rest of the world’s natural resources to grow, the US jumpstarted that new entrepreneur class and the ecosystem it needs to grow without us — whether that’s local management talent, trained coders, newly wealthy local angel investors, or just the Western capitalist mentality.

The concept of the American dream may be our biggest cultural export — bigger than Coca-Cola, Coach and KFC put together.

One hundred years from now, when we look back on the 21st century, the dominant story won’t be one of the emerging world graciously serving as the West’s inexhaustible source of low-cost labor and growing middle classes hungry for new goods and services. It’ll be the story of the formation of new, raw superpowers violently and chaotically bursting through the world’s floorboards.

Excerpted with permission of publisher John Wiley & Sons, Inc. from “Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit from Global Chaos,” Copyright (c) 2011 by Sarah Lacy.