23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

Our economy has been fundamentally transformed during the last few decades. Especially in the rich countries, manufacturing industry, once the driving force of capitalism, is not important any more. With the natural tendency for the (relative) demand for services to rise with prosperity and with the rise of high-productivity knowledge-based services (such as banking and management consulting), manufacturing industries have gone into decline in all rich countries. These countries have entered the ‘post-industrial’ age, where most people work in services and most outputs are services. The decline of manufacturing is not only something natural that we needn’t worry about but something that we should really celebrate. With the rise of knowledge-based services, it may be better even for some developing countries to skip those doomed manufacturing activities altogether and leapfrog straight to a service-based post-industrial economy.

What they don’t tell you

We may be living in a post-industrial society in the sense that most of us work in shops and offices rather than in factories. But we have not entered a post-industrial stage of development in the sense that industry has become unimportant. Most (although not all) of the shrinkage in the share of manufacturing in total output is not due to the fall in the absolute quantity of manufactured goods produced but due to the fall in their prices relative to those for services, which is caused by their faster growth in productivity (output per unit of input). Now, even though de-industrialization is mainly due to this differential productivity growth across sectors, and thus may not be something negative in itself, it has negative consequences for economy-wide productivity growth and for the balance of payments, which cannot be ignored. As for the idea that developing countries can largely skip industrialization and enter the post-industrial phase directly, it is a fantasy. Their limited scope for productivity growth makes services a poor engine of growth. The low tradability of services means that a more service-based economy will have a lower ability to export. Lower export earnings means a weaker ability to buy advanced technologies from abroad, which in turn leads to a slower growth.

Is there anything that is not made in China?

One day, Jin-Gyu, my nine-year-old son (yes, that’s the one who appeared as ‘my six-year-old son’ in my earlier book Bad Samaritans– really quite a versatile actor, he is) came and asked me: ‘Daddy, is there anything that is not made in China?’ I told him that, yes, it may not look that way, but other countries still make things. I then struggled to come up with an example. I was about to mention his ‘Japanese’ Nintendo DSi game console, but then I remembered seeing ‘Made in China’ on it. I managed to tell him that some mobile phones and flat-screen TVs are made in Korea, but I could not think of many other things that a nine-year-old would recognize (he is still too young for things like BMW). No wonder China is now called the ‘workshop of the world’.

It is hard to believe, but the phrase ‘workshop of the world’ was originally coined for Britain, which today, according to Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, has ‘no industry’. Having successfully launched the Industrial Revolution before other countries, Britain became such a dominant industrial power by the mid nineteenth century that it felt confident enough to completely liberalize its trade (see Thing 7). In 1860, it produced 20 per cent of world manufacturing output. In 1870, it accounted for 46 per cent of world trade in manufactured goods. The current Chinese share in world exports is only around 17 per cent (as of 2007), even though ‘everything’ seems to be made in China, so you can imagine the extent of British dominance then.

However, Britain’s pole position was shortlived. Having liberalized its trade completely around 1860, its relative position started declining from the 1880s, with countries such as the US and Germany rapidly catching up. It lost its leading position in the world’s industrial hierarchy by the time of the First World War, but the dominance of manufacturing in the British economy itself continued for a long time afterwards. Until the early 1970s, together with Germany, Britain had one of the world’s highest shares of manufacturing employment in total employment, at around 35 per cent. At the time, Britain was the quintessential manufacturing economy, exporting manufactured goods and importing food, fuel and raw materials. Its manufacturing trade surplus (manufacturing exports minus manufacturing imports) stayed consistently between 4 per cent and 6 per cent of GDP during the 1960s and 70s.