Page 96 - The Drucker Lectures

Structural Changes in the World Economy and Society [ 77

low-skill clerical work to do the jobs we cannot farm out. You
know the streets of Salt Lake City or of Logan have to be cleaned
and the trash has to be picked up. You can’t contract it out to a
developing country, and the bedpans in the hospital have to be
emptied here. But everything else we will increasingly find hard
to do, not only because the numbers are not there but because so
much of the labor supply is not available for unskilled jobs. Like
you in this room, most young people sit on their backsides so long
that they are no longer qualified for honest work. That’s not what
you go to a university for; the main purpose is that you come out
as a cost accountant four years later and never do an honest day’s
work again. And this, incidentally, also means that we will have
to learn to use older people and use part-time people.
Our largest single reservoir of labor is older women. For that
purpose an older woman is defined as somebody whose youngest
child is in third grade and therefore no longer comes home for
lunch. This is a most important social watershed in America.
The mother is suddenly emancipated but also lonely with no one
to talk to but the appliances, and then she goes to work. So we
will have to learn to use this social watershed productively.
If you look at the developing world, its population dynam-
ics are almost the opposite of ours. There, the increase in life
expectancy has barely begun. Average life expectancy in India is
still well below 40.
In every one of these countries, the birth rate has been go-
ing down very fast, at a faster rate than in the West, but infant
mortality rates have gone down even faster. In Mexico today,
the birth rate is about 30 percent below what it was in 1938. The
infant mortality rate is 90 percent lower: Of every ten babies
born in Mexico in 1938, eight were no longer alive in 1958. Of
every ten babies born in Mexico in 1958, eight are alive today.
This is one of the greatest swings in the history of mankind, and
it’s typical.