Financial Times paywall article (free with reg) discusses the
Fetish for Manufacturing:
Manufacturing fetishism – the idea that manufacturing is the central economic activity and everything else is somehow subordinate – is deeply ingrained in human thinking....
[But, w]hen you look at the value chain of manufactured goods we consume today, you quickly appreciate how small a proportion of the value of output is represented by the processes of manufacturing and assembly. Most of what you pay reflects the style of the suit, the design of the iPhone, the precision of the assembly of the aircraft engine, the painstaking pharmaceutical research, the quality assurance that tells you products really are what they claim to be.
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Manufacturing fetishism is deeply ingrained in MODERN human thinking....
Read something from the 1700s, when modern manufacturing was just getting going. In those days, the only REAL economy was farming. Manufacturing was just trinkets and toys.
It's really interesting that some of the arguments against a "manufacturing economy" are almost word for word the same as current arguments against a "service economy".
(I do like reading old books for precisely this reason. Sure they were biased ignorant. But it was a DIFFERENT bias and different ignorance. You can contrast it to your own and often get a good idea as to what is real, and what is cultural conditioning. Stuff from other cultures sometimes works too, but 1700s Britain is MORE foreign to us than 2012 China, and the language is easier to read.
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