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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, MAY 11, 1984
Europe hasn't reallv faced this. Japan understands it well and
has been moving out of steel, petrochemicals, textiles, and ship
building and has even faced the inevitability of having to get
out of the car manufacturing business. In the United States•••
there is widespread recognition that smokestack America is an
economy of the past•••• It is not too much to say that the United
States is... [shifting] from an economy that rested on the motor
car to an economy that rests on the computer••••
The U.S. will continue to do some manufacturing, but what it does
manufacture will be done with information-computers, including
robots--rather than with labour. Blue-collar jobs in the work
force are now down to about 15%. That figure will drop to below
10% by the end of the 1980s, and by the end of the 1990s it could
be as low as 3 or 4% (the same percentage of the U.S.'s workforce
in agriculture today).
But stand by for a long shake-out period in the new economy. Many
thousands of computer companies, software companies and cable
companies will go bust during the 1980s•••. To see this we have
only to recall what happened in the U.S. during the first half of
the century when we started to build automobiles. We created
more than 2,300 automobile manufacturing companies. There was a
long shake-out period and we finally ended up with four or
five...•
The United States is today an economy of entrepreneurs. More new
companies are being started than ever before in American
history.... The last time there was such an entrepreneurial
flowering was the last time we changed economies--from an agri
cultural to an industrial economy. Now, as we shift from an in
dustrial economy to an information economy,�e are seein�this
incredible explosion of entrepreneurial activity....
For America, Japan and Europe the trick for the 1980s in the new
global economy is to find the market niches--and to enter into
joint ventures where appropriate. What is Europe waiting for?•..
Europe's relative decline in the global marketplace is probably
inevitable, but there are many strong market niches to be chased
after--instead of continuing to turn decaying smokestack in
dustries into very expensive employment programmes.••• The coun
tries of Europe have no choice but to compete in the global
economy.
The question is whether they will go after market
niches where they can compete, or sink to third-, fourth- and
fifth-rate economic powers. The first step is to realize that
things are not going to get better or worse, but different.
Stuart Auerbach writing in the INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE of April 23,
1984, observes that in the new global economic interrelationship, America's
eyes increasingly are focused on Asia and away from Europe.
Analysts of U.S. trade patterns with the Far East say the U.S.
switch from Europe to the trans-Pacific route is as historic as
the shift almost 500 years ago, when the focus of world trade
moved from the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean as Euro
pean nations"'vied for the New World'sr"°iches...• The director of