When 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.
如果你考察一下我们现在消费的制成品的价值链,你会很快明白,制造和组装过程在产出价值中所占的比例有多校你花的大部分钱,都是在反映西装的式样、iPhone的设计、飞机引擎的构造精度、细致的制药研究,以及质量保证(告诉你这些产品确实像他们说的那样好)。
Physical labour incorporated in manufactured goods is a cheap commodity in a globalised world. But the skills and capabilities that turn that labour into products of extraordinary complexity and sophistication are not. The iPhone is a manufactured product, but its value to the user is as a crystallisation of services.
在一个全球化的世界里,制成品所包含的体力劳动是一种廉价商品。但将这些劳动转变为具有高度设计和技术含量的产品所需的技巧和能力并不廉价。iPhone属于制成品,但其对用户的价值却是服务的结晶。
Many of those who talk about the central economic importance of manufactured goods do so from an understandable concern for employment and the trade balance. Where will the jobs come from in a service-based economy, manufacturing fetishists ask? From doing here the things that cannot be done better elsewhere, either because of the particularity of the skills they require, or because these activities can only be performed close to home. Manufacturing was once a principal source of low-skilled employment but this can no longer be true in advanced economies.
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2020-09-15
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