When there wasn’t massive trade, every city and every village had it’s own butcher, baker, candlestick maker, and the bonfire of innovation in modern growth couldn’t get going. For a millennium, incomes for human civilization were stagnate. It wasn’t until 1820 or so, when you could move goods over long distances, that we started to see big factories and industrial clusters happening. But it was hard to move ideas over distance so those ideas stayed in the North. That was the Great Divergence. The North, the G7 more or less, had knowledge-driven growth that took off sooner and faster than the developing countries. [...]
For almost two centuries, basically all of what we call globalization. The G7 share rose from about a fifth to two-thirds in 170 years.
By the end of this whole thing, around 1990, there was a massive imbalance between know-how per worker in the rich countries and in the nearby poor countries. The information and communication technology revolution allowed the firms to move the knowledge across borders. This was transformative in rich countries, where it led to deindustrialization, and a wonderful thing in nearby developing countries, which saw rapid growth, rapid industrialization, and 650 million people rise out of poverty. [...]
Absolutely. The rage is rational but the reaction is not. My story of knowledge-driven globalization has technology at the heart of it. American workers are competing with robots at home and China abroad, and neither one is going well. [...]
Absolutely. There are jobs for people, even in manufacturing these days, but not for the low-skilled people who have been dispossessed by this. Their jobs were routine and the easiest to replace with automation. The first thing to do is accept the 21st–century reality that no matter what you do, these jobs aren’t coming back.
No comments:
Post a Comment