Dani Rodrik in Project Syndicate:
Could premature de-industrialization be a blessing in disguise, enabling workers in the developing world to bypass the drudgery of manufacturing?More here
If so, how such a future could be constructed is not at all clear. A society in which most workers are self-proprietors – shopkeepers, independent professionals, or artists – and set their own terms of employment while making an adequate living is feasible only when economy-wide productivity is already very high. High-productivity services – such as IT or finance – require well-trained workers, not the unskilled kind that poor countries have in abundance.