Page 159 - The Drucker Lectures

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worker. The Japanese haven’t pronounced it openly because it is
very unpopular, but they have reached the point where they con-
sider blue-collar labor a liability, not an asset. We still think it’s a
factor in production. The Japanese consider it a drag on produc-
tion. As a Japanese friend, one of my ex-students who is now a
vice minister, said: “Look at the demographics of the world for
the next 40 years. There is going to be no shortage of people in
Latin America, in East Asia. There is going to be no shortage of
people for manufacturing. Far from it. To worry about it as you
Americans do is just plain silly.”
So, what are some of the priorities out of this? First, let me
say a word about what we call mistakenly the nonprofit sector.
That’s a legal term, a tax-collector term. I call it a higher profit
sector. Nine hundred thousand nonprofit organizations exist in
this country, plus or minus. Thirty thousand new ones are cre-
ated each year. That is a uniquely American phenomenon. By
the year 2000, they will have doubled their share of the gross na-
tional product, which is about 3 percent. Nonprofits get three to
four times the effectiveness out of their resources. The govern-
ment, no matter who gets elected, will retrench. The deficit can-
not be maintained. And if we don’t want to have serious social
problems, we have to increase the effectiveness and the resources
of the nonprofit sector. That’s almost priority number one over
the next few years, or we’ll be in very serious trouble.
Priority number two: A little over a century ago, we began to
work on the productivity of people who make and move things.
That has been the great explosion, increasing 50-fold in 110
years. It’s totally unprecedented. Most of those gains were not
taken in the form of material goods. More than 50 percent of
the productivity gains have been taken in the form of less work.
Don’t call it leisure, necessarily. In 1909, the year I was born,
almost everybody in the developed world worked 3,300 hours
a year, except a very few rich people. Today, the Japanese still