I recently re-read the great classic from Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations. As I was going through the first chapter, I could not help but retrace the steps that the United States had taken to become the foremost super-power of the world.
The key factor of wealth, according to Smith, is specialization, the act by which one man is devoted to a single task. Smith often talked about the act of making nails; where one man could make a few dozens a day, a team, each focused on their specific tasks could make many more.
Thus, the wealth of the United States was realized in the specialization, to the highest degree possible, of its laboring force. The same process is now underway in China, which is turning its vast trove of illiterate laborers into a wealth of specialized workers.
The key gamble of the leaders of the United States is that the process by which China is enriching itself (and the world in general) by specializing its labour force will not interfere with the United States own growth.
I believe it is impossible to occupy the position of a super power and not have a specialized workforce. Some will point to the current trend in the services industry as evidence that the specialization is continuing, but I see the evidence of two levels of services, the low, unspecialized labor of burger flippers and hair dresser, and the high-tech services which account for most of the growth in raw productivity of the United States.
Of course, it is well known that China has cheapen its currency to achieve the goal of attracting capital investments and infrastructure building. The proper response of the United States, all those years ago should have been to reprice China’s currency. Such a maneuver would be difficult, if not impossible both politically and economically at this point. The population of the United States has grown lazy and accustomed to consuming what wealth there is. Maintaining an unbalanced currency helped in this process.
It will be seen now if the gamble of going for the high-tech was worth it.
My view is that it isn’t, simply because the majority of any population is incapable of working in such a mentally demanding environment. Thus menial, physical labor is perfectly acceptable for a large segment of the population. This is not to be understood as a caste system, but more broadly, it is a caste system of our own making, whereby the habits and entertainment we maintain, maintain us. For the beer drinking TV watcher who spends no time in formal education, what hope is he in a society that has turned its back on physical labor? It is, then, for those whose inclination takes them in this direction that industry needs to be taken care of.
Also, logically, how can such an advanced, high-tech society be built, but upon solid foundation of cheaply made, high-quality goods, whose cheapness and quality are dependent upon the specialization of the labor that made it? The common availability of such goods makes it more likely that neighboors will build likewise cheap and high quality goods, a virtuous cycle of sorts.
Finally, there is a very distinction between the physical and mental realms, as far as the labor itself is concerned. The act of mental creation is often quickly replicated; computers make it easy to automate systems and copy information once a clear path as been established, leading to thousands of copies of actions in a very short time. Meanwhile, in the physical realm, such shortcuts usually do not exist, simply because all physical process have a tendency to break down. Resources to make things are usually more expensive than in the mental realm also.
Yet, there is a strange inversion; for if in the physical realm, we have figured out how to proceed with specialization and manufacturing chains and robots, our mental models are far more primitive. How many software projects of large scales have ballooned all out of proportions? The UK health software system, or the USA replacement system for the airport guidance system have both been monumental and costly mistakes. This is because we are still working as mental artisans.
While in theory, we could have specialization in the mental realms, in practice it is often much more difficult to do so. The average high tech worker will have a dozen tools or so as part of his workflow. Email, web sites, internal tools, wordprocessing software, mathematical modeling tools, spreadsheet software, text processing, programming software, database systems, contact management, expenses accounts and many more. It is then impossible to have any speciality in such a workflow. If one could spend five to ten years with, say, a word processing tool, one could become a formidable specialist. Encouragingly, businesses and corporations have been resisting the so-called ‘upgrade treadmill’, which might in turn help overloaded workers acquire more specialization. But with the sheer amount of existing and new tools to help workers in their jobs, the possibility of specialization remains elusive.
The main reason that this is so was hinted above. Whatever can be clearly mentally conceived is quickly resolved, leaving us with a morass of unclear ideas. This is why large software projects run afoul of estimates. We simply have too many unclear ideas of the complexity that we have created. And until we can come to streamline and specialize our thoughts, it shall remain so.
