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ufacturing intensive, can no longer expect increased productivity in that sector to sustain its economic growth. Indeed, the great majority of working people in Japan are knowledge and service workers with productivities as low as those in any other developed country. And when farmers make up only 3% of the employed population, as they do in the United States, Japan, and most of Western Europe, even record increases in their output add virtually nothing to their country's overall productivity and wealth.
The chief economic priority for developed countries, therefore, must be to raise the productivity of knowledge and service work. The country that does this first will dominate the twenty-first century economically. The most pressing social challenge developed countries face, however, will be to raise the productivity of service work. Unless this challenge is met, the developed world will face increasing social tensions, increasing polarization, increasing radicalization, possibly even class war.
In developed economies, opportunities for careers and promotion are more and more limited to people with advanced schooling, people qualified for knowledge work. But these men and women will always be a minority. They will always be outnumbered by people who lack the qualifications for anything but low-skilled service jobs -- people who in their social position are comparable to the "proletarians" of 100 years ago, the poorly educated, unskilled masses who thronged the exploding industrial cities and streamed into their factories.
In the early 18805, intelligent observers of every political persuasion were obsessed with the specter of class war between the industrial proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Karl Marx was hardly alone in predicting that the "immiserization" of the proletariat would lead inevitably to revolution. Benjamin Disraeli, perhaps the greatest of the nineteenth century conservatives, was equally persuaded of the inevitability of class war. And Henry James, the chronicler of American wealth and European aristocracy, was so frightened by the prospect that he made it the central theme of The Princess Casamassima, one of his most haunting novels.
What defeated these prophecies, which seemed eminently reasonable, indeed almost self-evident to contemporaries, was the revolution in productivity set off by Frederick W. Taylor in 1881, when he began to study the way a common laborer shoveled sand. Taylor himself worked in an iron foundry and was deeply shocked by the bitter animosity between the workers and managers. Fearful that this hatred would ultimately lead to class war, he set out to improve the efficiency of industrial work. And his efforts, in turn, sparked the revolution that allowed industrial workers to earn middle-class wages and achieve middle-class status despite their lack of skill and education. By 1930, when according to Marx the revolution of the proletariat should have been a fait accompli, the proletariat had become the bourgeoisie.
Now it is time for another productivity revolution. This time, however, history is on our side. In the past century, we have learned a great deal about productivity and how to raise it -- enough to know that we need a revolution, enough to know how to start one.本论文由英语论文网 www.51lunwen.org整理提供
Knowledge and service workers range from research scientists and cardiac surgeons through drafts-women and store managers to 16-year olds who flip hamburgers in fast-food restaurants on Sat