| NOTA |
(★)(Why Manufacturing, not the Information Economy, Is the Key to Future Prosperity)(In this resounding challenge to conventional wisdom, the award-winning economics commentator Eamonn Fingleton takes careful aim at the information economy´s claim to have superseded manufacturing as the engine of America´s future prosperity. In lucid and compelling prose, Fingleton exposes startling flaws in the current view that the United States can be preeminent in the global economy by focusing exclusively on so-called postindustrial businesses such as finance, computer software, Internet services, and entertainment. A starting point for Fingleton´s brilliant analysis is the fact that advocates of postindustrialism simply don´t know what modern manufacturing is. In an error of historic proportions, they think of manufacturing as unsophisticated, ´snap-together´ assembly work, whereas in reality it has been rapidly moving toward the production of advanced materials and high-tech components. Those who produce such state-of-the-art goods --everything from the highly refined silicon required in semiconductors to the precisely engineered laser diodes that are powering the global telecommunications revolution-- work with ultra-sophisticated machinery and are frequently backed by a huge fund of proprietary, often secret production know-how. The result is ever-rising productivity levels. Thus the manufacturing-based economies of Germany, Switzerland, Singapore, and Japan not only do better than America´s postindustrial economy in terms of export prowess but at the same time provide the widest possible range of top-paying jobs for workers at all levels of capablity. ´In Praise of Hard Industries´ offers an authoritative and deeply disturbing counterargument to the many unexamined assumptions and glibly misstated facts that are driving our embrace of postindustrialism. ◆A former editor for Forbes and the Financial Times, Eamonn Fingleton is an economics commentator who has lived in Tokyo since 1985. His most recent books, ´Blindside : Why Japan Is Still on Track to Overtake the U.S. by the Year 2000´, was praised by John Kenneth Galbraith, James Fallows, and Bill Clinton and was named one of the ten best business books of 1995 by Business Week.) |
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