GOODBYE TO SMOKESTACKS

physically and economically from the disappearance of manufacturing

PONTIFICATING on economics, Lyndon Johnson once said, was like pissing in your pants, a matter of burning importance to you but distasteful for everyone else. The Spectator's recent anniversary review of the last 170 years covered politics and the arts, but it did not review economic develop- ments — yet those developments have not been too distasteful.

The next 170 years will be even more tasteful, for they will witness the near- extinction of manufacturing industry. Just think, soon there will be an end to smokestacks, an end to spokesmen from the CBI whining about exchange rates, and an end to gritty training initiatives from the DTI. Britain will be more beautiful, both physically and spiritually.

The first economic survey in England, Natural and Political Observations and Conclusions upon the State and Condition of England, was published by Gregory King in 1688. King was Rouge Dragon pursuiv- ant at the College of Arms, secretary to the Commission for Taking and Stating the Public Accounts, and a surveyor whose name survives in London. Greek Street, which he laid out, was originally Greg Street after his Christian name, and Soho Square was once King Square.

In his 1688 survey, King found that there were 5,450,000 people in England and Wales. Sixty per cent of the working popu- lation was employed on the land. Today, only some 2 per cent of the working popu- lation is employed on the land. Once, the shift of labour from the fields into the cities was greeted with horror ('who will grow the food?'), just as the decline of manufacture is now bemoaned (Isn't man- ufacture the only real part of the econo- my?'), which only reveals how ill-informed some commentary can be. The 2 per cent that remains in agriculture produces well over 100 times as much food per worker as the 60 per cent did in 1688.

It is commonly believed that before the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions, man inhabited a rural Arcadia. Bucolic, pink-cheeked, besmocked peasants ambled plentifully through a green and pleasant land, counting their sheep and plucking `See you later flagellator.' apples. Wickedly, the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions changed all that: ruthless landowners enclosed the fields and forced the peasants into urban slums, where cruel mill-owners drove them 14 or 16 hours a day, all the time forcing their children up chimneys and befuddling them with gin.

The reality was different. Life before the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions was terrible. In 1688 Gregory King found that more than half the population, 2,825,500 souls, could not afford to eat, their wages were so low. But for charity they would have starved, and even with it they generally did. It was the Agricultural Revolution which saved the poor, because it increased the production of food. It also made possible the Industrial Revolution, because the cheaper food provided the factory-owners with spare cash, which they used to lure the peasantry off the fields.

Not that the peasantry needed much lur- ing: life was easier in the cities. The 1842 Royal Commission on Children's Employ- ment reported that living conditions were much better in the new Lancashire mill towns than in the countryside. As R.E. Prothero complained in 1888 in his Pio- neers and Progress of English Farming, agri- cultural labourers were the worst housed of all, 'herded together in conditions which, by their imperfect arrangements, violated every sanitary law, generated all kinds of diseases, and rendered modesty an unimaginable thing'.

The agricultural worker was also the worst fed of all, subsisting on a meagre diet of cheese, bacon and milk. He was also the worst paid unless he happened to live near a northern city, where the compe- tition from the mills and factories for his labour forced the farmers to double his salary. Southern agricultural workers enjoyed no such relief.

Contrary to myth, therefore, the Agri- cultural and Industrial Revolutions were periods of ever-increasing standards of liv- ing for all. Whatever their horrors, those revolutions liberated mankind from even worse ones; and, around 1828, the year of The Spectator's birth, another phenomenon was born — steady economic growth.

Remarkably, since the late 1820s, the leading capitalist countries such as the United Kingdom, the United States, Cana- da and Switzerland have grown at 2 per cent per person per year. Some particular years, of course, have seen better rates than that, but those have inevitably been nullified by lean ones. The correction mechanism is astonishingly strong. We grow today, as we have for 170 years, at 2 per cent per person per year.

The engine is technology, which has driven the increased productivity of manu- facture and of agriculture. But, cruelly, these industries' reward has been bleak relative decline. Manufacture is going the same way as agriculture, and soon it too will only account for 2 per cent of the economy. In 1688 manufacture employed 15 per cent of Britons. By 1820 that had doubled to 30 per cent, and by 1890 it had reached 45 per cent. But today it has dropped to fewer than 20 per cent and is falling fast. In the United States it is only 18 per cent.

The factory of the future will resemble a laboratory, not a workshop. Robots, not people, will make things, and robots will make and repair other robots. Supervising our mechanical friends will be a coterie of computer specialists. To create new prod- ucts they will write new programmes, and intelligent machines will do everything else. Yet, through their robots, individual programmers will produce a hundred times more objects than could armies of men on the production lines.

The future lies in services, and a good thing too. We want services. We do not want our workers to be locked away in fac- tories, we want them on the high street, ministering to us. We want them to be cut- ting our hair or taking our orders in the brasserie. We want them to be writing nov- els, teaching our children in very small classes, and staffing our hospitals in such numbers as to eliminate waiting lists and unnecessary deaths. We want them to beautify our lives and to help with child- care.

Services are people-orientated, small in scale and inherently democratic. They fos- ter good manners, and they abjure nation- alism and militarism. Services are flexible, reactive, anti-corporate and, as long as they are not nationalised, apolitical. Ser- vices in the private sector rarely lobby for higher taxes or for subsidies. Services are fun.

From our perspective, we can now see that the demand for personal services has been the motor of the last few centuries. The Agricultural and Industrial Revolu- tions were merely the means by which which we transferred the workers from looking after things to looking after each other.

Governments distrust services. They lust after monolithic power blocks, preferably dependent ones, and where governments are strong — in places such as Europe they use subsidies to support agriculture and manufacture. The service sector in Germany is a full 15 per cent of GDP smaller than in the United States. But, where governments are too strong, economies stagnate, and the two success stories of recent years, the US and the UK, possess the most service-orientated economies. Services now account for some 75 per cent of American GDP, and the UK is catching up fast.

The Anglophone nations led the world through the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions and, today, they are leading it through the Service Revolution. In 170 years' time, The Spectator will boast a staff of thousands, and nobody will need to live in the north of England.