Jim Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies points to this nugget from a recent National Science Foundation report:
Market-oriented knowledge-intensive services-business, financial, and communications-are driving growth in the service sector, which now accounts for nearly 70% of global economic activity. Market-oriented knowledge-intensive services generated $12 trillion in gross revenues (sales) in 2005 and grew almost twice as fast as other services between 1986 and 2005. The United States is the leading provider of market-oriented knowledge-intensive services, responsible for about 40% of world revenues on a value-added basis (gross revenue sales minus the purchase of domestic and imported supplies and inputs from other industries) over the past decade. The U.S. world share of value added exceeds world share of both the EU and Asia in all three industries.”
This suggests that people in the US have shifted to activities that provide a greater return for their efforts. It’s a different slant on competitiveness. If you’ll let me invoke Jeremy Bentham, we let people choose the occupation that provides them with the most utility, and if most people get the most utility from income, they’ll go into “knowledge-intensive services-business, financial, and communications” instead of science. This may be bad for security or for technological progress, but it’s good for GDP growth to have people go into fast growing sectors.
The growth engine of the economy is the creative occupations - not just science and technology -but the creative fields across the board: high-tech to business, finance to entertainment.
August 8th, 2008 at 12:49 pm
The second comment strikes me as shortsighted. Going into “knowledge-intensive services-business, financial, and communications instead of science” is bad for GDP growth in the long-run because these knowledge-intensive services are only good for GDP so long as they are backed up by good science. Knowledge-intensive service jobs in communications, for example, would dry up pretty quickly if researchers quit developing new communications technologies. It may be true that the lag between ’science’ and the knowledge-intensive services that its products eventually spur demand for is quite long. But, science is still an integral piece of the process, especially if the process is to be sustainable.
August 9th, 2008 at 8:34 am
Great piece! It’s about time that the US gets recognized as the creative machine that it is and has always been. Hopefully that will continue to radiate throughout the world for the betterment of all.