• The End of Development
• Tim Barker (bio)

Call centers have become the emblem of India’s service-sector development model. (Gautam Singh/IndiaPictures/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

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When I was in high school, my economics class read The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs. The book is a passionate appeal to help those living in the worst poverty in the world. Sachs writes that we should not worry too much about the people in second-to-last place, such as the poorly paid workers in labor-intensive industries who were then the focus of considerable debate and activism on U.S. college campuses. Sweatshop workers, Sachs conceded, were on the bottom rung of the ladder. But subsistence farmers were not on the ladder at all. Once we helped them get a foothold, they could begin ascending from textiles all the way up to high tech. I internalized Sachs’s argument, sensing it would help me feel better about the world we live in.

This idea that sweatshops are good is so convenient that it will probably live forever. It provided the basic logic behind Matthew Yglesias’s defense of unsafe workplaces published after more than 1,100 people died in the 2013 Rana Plaza factory collapse. Safety is nice but “money is also good,” and who could deny that “Bangladesh has gotten a lot richer” in recent decades? History might be a slaughter bench, but at least it had a clear direction, namely the upward sloping trend of GDP per capita. Vox, cofounded by Yglesias in 2014, ran similar takes, including the charge that Bernie Sanders’s “war on trade” “would hurt the very poorest people on Earth” by depriving them of low-wage employment in export industries. So it was striking when Yglesias took note of a new trend “in which countries start to lose their manufacturing jobs without getting rich first.” Disturbingly, this was not because of protectionism or misguided safety regulations but because of dynamics internal to capitalist development. “Structural change,” he wrote, “is moving in the wrong direction.” The ladder was broken.

Since 2013, there has been increasing discussion in the United States about secular stagnation, a long-term tendency toward weak business investment and slow growth. The conversation is often centered on wealthy countries, which makes it possible to imagine that we’ve become so rich that we’re sated with physical products and naturally spend more [End Page 23] and more of our income on services and experiences. Thus, the titles of recent books: Dietrich Vollrath’s Fully Grown: Why a Stagnant Economy Is a Sign of Success, or Tyler Cowen’s The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better.

These reassurances look glib when confronted with global economic stagnation. Slowing growth around the world cannot be explained as the sign of economic “maturity.” Instead, many countries are experiencing “premature deindustrialization,” a term coined by José Gabriel Palma and popularized by Harvard economist Dani Rodrik. Earlier processes of deindustrialization left rust belts across the poorer parts of rich countries, from Kenosha to Osaka. It is usually assumed that the old factory jobs moved to other countries. Rodrik’s observation is that deindustrialization has been happening across the Global South as well, where industrial employment has already peaked and begun to decline. This is “premature” in the sense that the peaks are coming at a lower level (measured in share of employment and output or the level of national income) than they did in the now-rich countries that industrialized earlier. At the height of the golden age of capitalism in 1973, Japan, Germany, and the UK had roughly 40 to 50 percent of their populations working in manufacturing. In Brazil, by contrast, the peak, reached in 1986, was 23 percent; for Nigeria, in 1991, it was just 13 percent.

It is easy, and appropriate, to be skeptical of the common attitude that good jobs are necessarily manufacturing jobs. There are a wide range of valuable economic activities, and there is no historical necessity that makes some kinds of jobs...

• 发展的终结
• 蒂姆·巴克（生物）

呼叫中心已成为印度服务业发展模式的象征。（Gautam Singh / IndiaPictures / Universal Images组通过Getty Images）

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当我上高中时，我的经济学课读了杰弗里·萨克斯（Jeffrey Sachs）的《贫困的终结》。这本书是热烈的呼吁，旨在帮助世界上最贫困的人们。萨克斯（Sachs）写道，我们不应该为倒数第二的人担心太多，例如劳动密集型产业中收入低的工人，这些工人后来成为美国大学校园中大量辩论和激进主义的焦点。萨克斯承认，血汗工厂的工人在梯子的底部。但是，自给自足的农民根本不在阶梯上。一旦我们帮助他们立足，他们就可以从纺织品一直上升到高科技。我内化了萨克斯（Sachs）的观点，感觉到这将使我对我们所生活的世界有更好的感觉。

血汗工厂是好的想法很方便，以至于它可能永远存在。它为Matthew Yglesias捍卫不安全的工作场所辩护提供了基本逻辑，在2013年Rana Plaza工厂倒塌后有1100多人死亡。安全性不错，但“金钱也不错”，谁能否认近几十年来“孟加拉国变得更加富裕”？历史也许是一个宰杀的台阶，但至少它有一个明确的方向，即人均国内生产总值的上升趋势。沃克斯由伊格莱西亚斯（Yglesias）于2014年共同创立的公司也采取了类似的做法，包括指控伯尼·桑德斯（Bernie Sanders）的“贸易战”会剥夺他们在出口行业的低薪工作，从而“伤害了地球上最贫穷的人”。因此，当伊格莱西亚斯注意到一个新趋势“其中的国家开始失去制造业工作而不首先致富”时，这是令人惊讶的。令人不安的是，这不是由于保护主义或错误的安全法规，而是由于资本主义发展的内在动力。他写道：“结构变化正在朝错误的方向发展。” 梯子坏了。

自2013年以来，在美国，关于长期停滞，商业投资疲软和增长缓慢的长期趋势一直存在着越来越多的讨论。对话通常以富裕国家为中心，这使我们可以想象我们已经变得如此富有，以至于我们对实体产品感到满意，自然而然地在服务和体验上花费了更多[End Page 23]和我们的更多收入。因此，最近出版的书籍的标题是：Dietrich Vollrath的《全面成长：为什么停滞的经济是成功的标志》，或者Tyler Cowen的《大停滞：美国如何吃掉现代历史上所有低劣的果实，病了和意志（最终感觉更好。

当面对全球经济停滞时，这些放心的举动显得无能为力。全球增长放缓不能被解释为经济“成熟”的标志。相反，许多国家正在经历“过早的去工业化”，这是由何塞·加布里埃尔·帕尔马（JoséGabriel Palma）创造并由哈佛大学经济学家丹尼·罗德里克（Dani Rodrik）推广的术语。较早的去工业化进程在从基诺沙到大阪的富裕国家的较贫穷地区留下了锈迹斑斑的带子。通常假定旧工厂的工作转移到了其他国家。罗德里克（Rodrik）的观察是，全球南方也正在发生去工业化，那里的工业就业已经达到顶峰并开始下降。这是“过早的”，在某种意义上说，高峰比目前较早工业化的富裕国家处于更低的水平（以就业和产出所占比例或国民收入水平衡量）。在1973年资本主义的黄金时代鼎盛时期，日本，德国和英国约有40％至50％的人口从事制造业。相比之下，巴西的最高峰是1986年，为23％。对于1991年的尼日利亚而言，这一比例仅为13％。

对普遍的态度表示怀疑，即好工作必定是制造业工作，这是容易且适当的。有多种有价值的经济活动，而且历史上没有必要从事某些工作...