Читать книгу Standing on the Sun - Christopher Meyer - Страница 18

Back in the days when competition was coming to the U.S. telecommunications market, the new entrants were rapidly deploying modern digital technologies to give them an edge over the established regulated monopoly. Bell System executives, faced with having to write off and replace their aging physical plant, encoded their predicament with a rueful joke: “How did God create the world in six days?” they asked. The answer: “No embedded base.”

We started our survey of environmental changes with the growth of emerging economies, and we end there as well. For although the changes we've described will create a new setting for capitalism worldwide, not every part of the world will be equally positioned to capitalize on it. The emerging economies, by virtue of their rapid growth rates, their youth, and their delay in entering the global economy, are the fields in which new practices will flourish.

There is a precedent for this pattern. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was the British economy that was the engine of innovation. New industrial technologies were pouring out of its workshops. Inventors in England and Scotland came up with the theory of electricity and magnetism, steam power, dynamos, and Bessemer steelmaking. They invented the telegraph, Bakelite, and pasteurization. Steel replaced wrought iron. Mass production using interchangeable parts and division of labor unseated artisanal fabrication. The Scots even invented a fundamental doctrine of market capitalism—the invisible hand—to explain to the foot-draggers why they, the British, were being so successful. In light of Great Britain's standing and continued innovation, the Victorians had every reason to believe that their empire would remain the leading global power. The reason behind all this innovation was obvious: as the world's richest economy, Britain could afford the universities, the time devoted to study, and the private laboratories lords liked to have in their castles. (Birr castle in Ireland, where the dynamo was invented, also for a time housed the world's largest telescope. Yes, cloudy, rainy Ireland.)

But a strange thing happened on the way to hegemony. Another nation, geographically larger but far poorer in its stock of intellectual and financial capital, also embraced the new technologies. And precisely because it had no embedded base and no establishment to speak of, these technologies became the foundation of the new society that was rapidly growing there. As the new industrial systems presented challenges, the impulse was to respond to them and not to see them as proof of the innovation's limited value. Need massive amounts of capital to build mills? Create a national banking system. Need to get more productivity out of that investment in a plant? Institute a third shift—and while you're at it, build a company town to ensure your labor supply. Need a bigger market to absorb the output of efficient-scale factories? Build a transcontinental railroad system to open up far-flung territory. Need workers capable of operating machine tools? Make high school mandatory.

Even plagued as it was by missteps and misdeeds—from gold price manipulation and railroad stock fraud to the excesses of robber barons and labor uprisings—the United States by World War II had become the dominant military and economic power. It succeeded almost in spite of itself because it had built its economy and society around the newly available technologies of the Industrial Revolution. And because it had room—physical, mental, emotional, commercial—in which to grow.

The parallel today is inescapable. We've all read the statistics about the upside potential of the Indian and Chinese markets, and we know they are only now embarking on their own phenomenal growth trajectories. We know there are not well-developed industries in these emerging economies that will resist the disruptive innovation; those with enough juice to play are desperate to move forward. We know there is little now to hold back the entrepreneurial talent and ambition of literally tens of millions of people, to whom it is now abundantly clear that economic growth is possible.

Meanwhile, this time around the United States has that inertial challenge to overcome, the unattractive prospect of dismantling the massive institutions and entrenched interests built up in the industrial age. And the other G7 countries, having just caught up with the United States, don't have it any easier. It will be the economies that lack an embedded base that can get right down to building what makes sense given the new rules of a changed world.

We had a bench-scale preview of this situation in the 1980s when Japan had the opportunity to do a “release 2.0” on the world economy and beat the United States at its own game as an industrial power. U.S. auto companies were startled to find that Japanese competitors had surpassed them on both cost and quality dimensions, and even when they understood the logic of that breakthrough performance, it was a tremendous struggle for them to retool themselves. And in that case, it was mostly just a change of technology. Executives had to swallow only one power-shifting idea—that customers, and not manufacturers, got to define the meaning of “quality”—and the rest of the challenge was sucking it up and investing what was needed to replace outmoded production techniques. This time, fundamental ideas about capital, competition, and collaboration and the roles and purposes of government, the financial industry, and corporations are all subject to rethinking.

John Maynard Keynes once observed, “The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.” In the coming decades brilliant ideas for business, economic, and social innovations will come from everywhere, but it will be in the green fields of the rapidly growing emerging economies that the next generation of capitalism will take hold. Will the institutions of the developed world—corporations, governments, and citizens—react in the way the U.S. automakers did to the Japanese innovations of the 1980s? Will they be a little late to wake up but willing to learn, adopt the innovations, and fight back? (Note that even then success was elusive, or the U.S. wouldn't have had its bailouts.) Or will they mirror the stagnation of England, which took fifty years to adapt to its loss of leadership? It's a question of how quickly their capitalists can escape their old ideas.