THE THIRD WAVE
Thus, Morehouse says, the great product diversity in microelectronics means that “developing countries can take a basic technology and adapt it more easily to suit their own social requirements or raw materials. Microelectronic technology lends itself to decentralization of production.”
This also means reduced population pressures on the big cities, and the rapid miniaturization in this field cuts transportation costs as well. Best of all, this form of production has low energy requirements, and the growth of the market is so rapid—and the competition so keen— that even though rich nations attempt to monopolize these industries they are unlikely to succeed.
Morehouse is not alone in pointing out how the most advanced Third Wave industries dovetail with the needs of the poor countries. Says Roger Melen, Associate Director of Stanford University’s Integrated Circuit Laboratory: “The industrial world moved everybody into the cities for production, and now we’re moving the factories and work forces back into the country, but many nations have never really switched from a 17th century agrarian economy, including China. It now appears they can integrate new manufacturing techniques into their society without moving entire populations.”
If this is so, the Third Wave offers a fresh technological strategy for the war on want.
The Third Wave throws the need for transportation and communication into a new perspective as well. At the time of the industrial revolution, roads were a prerequisite for social, political, and economic development. Today an electronic communications system is necessary. It was once thought that communications were the outgrowth of economic development. Now, says John Magee, president of Arthur D. Little, the research firm, this “is an outmoded thesis . . . telecommunications is more of a precondition than a consequence.”
Today’s plummeting cost of communications suggests the substitution of communications for many transport functions. It may be far cheaper, more energy-conserving, and more appropriate in the long run to lay in an advanced communications network than a ramified structure of costly roads and streets. Clearly, road transport is needed. But to the degree that production is decentralized, rather than centralized, transport costs can be minimized without isolating villages from one another, from the urban areas, or from the world at large.
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