Page 117 - The Drucker Lectures

98 [ The Drucker Lectures

too. And servants have been the largest employee group since
well before recorded history: as slaves, as serfs. And this century
began quite conventionally with an enormous array of servants,
and it ends with no servants at all.
The other large group—not in Great Britain anymore, but in
the rest of the developed world—were farmers. In this country,
1900 was the first census in which farmers were not more than
half the American population; they were just 50 percent. When
we came out of World War II in this country, more than one-
quarter of the population was still farming. In Japan, it was 60
percent—three-fifths. And now, as you know, we are down to
2½ percent in this country, and they’re now down to 4 percent in
Japan. Incidentally, to me, the most interesting event of the last
election was that the American farmer had become a nonper-
son. Mr. [Michael] Dukakis and Mr. [George Herbert Walker]
Bush—remember those two gentlemen?—made one visit apiece
to Iowa, gave exactly the same speech, never came back, and never
said another word about the farm. Politicians are pretty good at
counting heads. And they looked at them and said, “It makes no
bit of difference which way those people vote.” And it didn’t.
But the most important and interesting development is not
even the disappearance of those two key work categories. Even
more remarkable is that in this century we have seen the mete-
oric rise and the meteoric fall of the factory worker.
By 1955, about a hundred years after Marx and Engels, the
industrial working class had become the dominant group in ev-
ery developed country, politically and economically. But in the
last 30 years, this class that had risen meteorically for a hundred
years began to shrink very fast. In this country, in 30 years, it
went down from more than one-third of the working population
to below one-fifth. In Japan, it’s going the same way. And the
decline in importance—and I don’t necessarily mean quantita-
tive, but qualitative—is even faster. It would have been incon-