On Jan 12, 2008, at 2:08 AM, Seth Ackerman wrote:
>
> Yeah, but as societies get richer, you'd expect more employment to
> go to
> services at the expense of factories, since productivity rises
> faster in
> mfg.
This assumption is more than dubious. Since most services are nonproductive (neither increase nor decrease the total real output of consumable and investible goods and services, representing merely private or social overhead costs) "productivity" is not a meaningful concept in relation to them. As to services that are in fact productive (notably transportation and consumer-purchased communication services) there is no reason to expect productivity in these sectors to grow less rapidly than in manufacturing. In light of the extremely dynamic broadband and wireless communication subsectors, productivity in productive services might actually be growing faster than in the manufacturing sector.
Shane Mage
"Thunderbolt steers all things...it consents and does not consent to be called Zeus."
Herakleitos of Ephesos