The thing about economics though is it's about the average case, not the individual case. There's always going to be winners and losers, but as long as the winners beat out the losers things work okay. I think a future dedicated towards decentralized/distributed micro-economies relying on coordination and communication would be ideal, because it could prevent exactly what your town experienced. Automation in conjunction with networking could make your town a viable manufacturing micro-hub, for example, instead of those sorts of things being shipped off to Shenzhen. I'd argue The reason china is such a power house is precisely because we don't have the automation necessary to compete with them.