Page 97 - The Drucker Lectures

78 [ The Drucker Lectures

By 1990, the population explosion will be over in the devel-
oping countries. Birth rates and infant morality rates will be in
balance because birth rates are still going down very fast, and in-
fant mortality rates are no longer going down at all or very little.
In another 15 to 20 years, at the latest, they will have established
very much our kind of population balance or the balance we had
in 1920, perhaps.
But for another 10 or 15 years the major problem of the devel-
oping countries will be to find jobs for young people who are not
particularly highly trained or highly schooled. But they do have
a great deal more training and more schooling than their parents
had, and what is much more important, their parents were in the
back country, in some God-forsaken pueblo in the hills. If they
made any trouble, four rural policemen were sent with subma-
chine guns, and that was the end of it. Now the kids can hop
the tailgate of a truck and, four hours later, arrive in a large city.
The sleepy provincial towns, which you will still find described
in travel books on Mexico written in 1939, now have a 1.5 mil-
lion people: Guadalajara, Puebla, San Miguel Allende, Oaxaca,
are all very large cities now. Their slums are not the ideal human
habitat, but they are better than what the people left behind in the
pueblo. They have a better diet, more chance of education, even
better housing, and the chance of a job that makes the appeal
to go to the city irresistible. And these kids, while not particu-
larly well trained, are available. And the only way the developing
countries can avoid real catastrophe and social convulsions is to
provide jobs for these young people. And almost none of them
have enough of a domestic market. Only Brazil perhaps. Perhaps
India. The rest can hope to find jobs only if there are jobs for
export to the markets of the developed world.
And so the central economic problem of the next 15 years
will be to put together our need for labor and their need for jobs
in what I, for lack of a better name, call “production sharing.”