Citação: Ha-Joon Chang – “sociedade pós-industrial” é industrializada

Foi avassaladora a ideia de que a partir dos anos de 1960, aproximadamente, teria ocorrido uma inflexão tal que teria deslocado o capital como base da economia capitalista – o que é também um contrassenso. O conhecimento ocuparia dali em diante o centro da dinâmica econômica numa sociedade chamada “pós-industrial”. Parecia que as tendências mais promissoras caminhavam rumo à valorização do trabalho como depósito social desse conhecimento. Com esse deslocamento, junto viria o desaparecimento do processo industrial. De certa maneira, até as grandes corporações estariam destinadas ao desaparecimento com o desenvolvimento das empresas “pós-modernas” descentralizadas. Bem, as coisas não se parecem exatamente dessa maneira:

The discourse of the post-industrial age, originating from the 1970s, starts from the simple but powerful idea that people increasingly want finer things as they become richer. Once people fill their bellies, agriculture declines. When they meet other more basic needs, like clothing and furniture, they move on to more sophisticated consumer goods, like electronics and cars. When most people have these things, consumer demand shifts to services – eating out, theatre, tourism, financial services and so on. At that point, industry begins to decline, and services become the dominant economic sector, starting the post-industrial age of human economic progress. This view of the post-industrial age gained traction in the 1990s, when almost all rich economies started seeing the importance of manufacturing fall and the importance of services rise, both in terms of output and employment – this process is known as ‘deindustrialization’. Especially with China emerging as the biggest industrial nation in the world, the proponents of the post-industrial society argued that manufacturing had become what low-technology, low-wage countries like China did, while high-end services, like finance, IT services and business consulting, were the future, especially for rich countries.

And in this discourse, Switzerland, sometimes together with Singapore, has been touted as the proof that countries can maintain a very high standard of living by specializing in services. Persuaded by the argument and inspired by the examples of Switzerland and Singapore, some developing countries, such as India and Rwanda, even have been trying to more or less skip industrialization altogether and develop their economies by becoming specialized exporters of high-end services. Unfortunately for the advocates of post-industrial society, Switzerland is actually the most industrialized economy in the world, producing the largest amount of manufacturing output per person. We don’t see many ‘Made in Switzerland’ products partly because the country is small (only around 9 million people) but also because it specializes in what economists call ‘producer goods’ – machines, precision equipment and industrial chemicals – that ordinary consumers, like you and me, do not see. It is interesting to note that Singapore, another supposed post-industrial success story, is the world’s second most industrialized economy. Using Switzerland and Singapore as models of post-industrial service economy is like – how shall I put it? – using Norway and Finland to promote beach holidays.

The advocates of post-industrialism fundamentally misunderstand the nature of recent economic changes. What is driving deindustrialization is mainly changes in productivity, not changes in demand.

This point is easier to see in relation to employment. Because the manufacturing process has become increasingly mechanized, we don’t need the same number of workers to produce the same amount of manufacturing output (see ‘Strawberry’). With the help of machines and even industrial robots, workers today can produce many multiples of what their parents’ generation could. A half century ago, manufacturing took up around 40% of the workforce in the rich countries, but today the same – and sometimes even greater – amount of output is produced with 10–20% of the workforce.

The dynamics of output are a little more complicated. It is true that the importance of manufacturing in the national economy has declined while that of services has risen in these countries. However, this has happened not because the demand for services has increased more than has the demand for manufactured goods in absolute terms, as the proponents of the postindustrial discourse would have us believe. It has happened mainly because services are becoming relatively more expensive, given the faster productivity growth in manufacturing than in services. Just think how computers and mobile phones have become so much cheaper over the last couple of decades, compared to haircuts or eating out. If we take into account the effects of such relative price changes, the share of manufacturing in national output has declined only marginally in most rich countries (the UK is an exception) and even increased in some countries (such as Switzerland, Sweden and Finland) in the last few decades.

Contrary to the myth of post-industrialism, the ability to produce manufactured goods competitively remains the most important determinant of a country’s living standards… (Chang, 2022, p. s/p).

Referência

Chang, Ha-Joon. (2022). Edible Economics: A Hungry Economist Explains the World. Public Affairs.

Tags

Ha-Joon Chang Desindustrialização Reindustrialização Sociedade Pós-Industrial