>No you shouldn't: low tech is what industries in the 3rd world can do best,
>and if you flood their market with subsidized products you destroy their
>fledgling industries. Instead, you should open your markets and _buy_ their
>products. Even if this upsets your steel lobby (and your textile lobby, and
>your toy lobby and...)
Yeah, but low tech industry makes for low value-added product in the context of this world political economy of ours. So the 'developing world' (as apposite a labbel as 'United Kingdom') is flogging loads of real labour and real natural resources, and paying real opportunity costs, for each high-tech, high-value-added, near-zero-cost disk of Windows '98.
This is what dependency theory was all about, no? All the profits in the first world and all the costs in the third. There's no biting into those huge interest bills down that road, is there?
I predict some recognisably leftie rhetoric and even some leftie policy from the 'developing world' over the next few years. They know better than we that nothing else is bloody working ...
Cheers, Rob.