Content area
Full Text
Fingleton, Eamonn. In praise of hard industries: Why manufacturing, not the information economy, is the key to future prosperity. New York, NY, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999. 273 pp. ISBN 0-395-89968-0.
Few Americans appear concerned by the secular decline in manufacturing employment in the country, while enthusiasm abounds over the growth of the knowledge economy and the variety of service-sector jobs that information and communication technologies are creating. In a thoughtful analysis of the post-industrial society, Eamonn Fingleton, a former journalist with Forbes and the Financial Times, argues that these sentiments are mistaken on both counts. In three ways, excessive reliance on the information society in the United States as the new engine of growth is, according to the author, a prescription for economic decline.
First, the knowledge economy is creating an "unbalanced mix" of jobs. The new occupations in finance, software and consulting, among other sectors, favour not merely the well-educated, but an intelligent elite. Unlike manufacturing, which provides more, and more heterogeneous job possibilities, the knowledge economy will result in a labour market stratified by sheer brain power. Fingleton cites an estimate according to which up to 20 per cent of the United States workforce faces marginalization in the transition to a knowledge-based service economy.
Second, the rise of the post-industrial economy has resulted in declining income growth: "nearly two decades after the United States began its fateful drift into full-scale post-industrialism, international economic comparisons consistently show that Americans have lagged in income growth in the interim" (p. 7). The consequence is that per capita income in the United States now trails...