Doug Irwin: uncertainty

Transcript context

…But say you look at countries such as Brazil, India, South Africa. It seems their share of employment in manufacturing has stagnated and is even going down. It never reached 15 percent. Whereas in the United States, Great Britain, Germany, you have the share of employment in manufacturing going well over 25 percent, sometimes as high as 40 percent. It ends up falling, but you build a stable middle class first that supports a democracy. Is this a reason to be more pessimistic about the economic prospects of countries that have not yet industrialized? I don’t know about pessimistic, but certainly they’re going to have to choose a different path. If these people are going to be going into services rather than manufacturing, it could be the schooling system is much more important to the extent that human capital is more important for services. They just can’t follow the old recipe that other countries did before them. Last question. What might you, Douglas A. Irwin, know about the history of Chicago School of Economics that the rest of us do not? And what are you planning on working on, on this particular question?…

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