De rajada li quase 1/8 do livro (pensei logo em 60 km de caminhadas para o completar) e encontrei uma série de coisas interessantes. No entanto, gostaria de começar por um relato, o relato da experiência de vida do autor, natural de Hong Kong:
“my fascination—or perhaps, obsession—with industry dynamics and the constant displacement of early pioneers goes back much further to a time before I thought of joining academia. Born and raised in Hong Kong, I watched the inevitable migration of knowledge and capital. I remember my elementary school teachers describing the economy of Hong Kong as an “entrepôt,” a term the British applied to my city when it served as the only window between China and the rest of the world. Virtually all merchandise and goods—cheese, chocolate, automobiles, raw cotton, and rice—had to pass through Hong Kong on their way in and out of China.Por cá a maioria das pessoas associa os altos e baixos da economia, a azar, a ignorância ou a falcatrua. No entanto, a economia é uma continuação da biologia, com os seus altos e baixos mesmo para quem trabalha bem. Em vez de confiar que o ovo vai estar no cu da galinha, em vez de confiar que os planetas se alinharão quando for preciso, é preciso tentar estar um passo à frente e, mesmo assim perceber que pode não ser suficiente.
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With its low labor costs, Hong Kong rose as a major manufacturing hub for labor-intensive industries. The once-sleepy fishing village became “the Pearl of the East,” a shining example of economic development. By 1972, Hong Kong had replaced Japan as the world’s largest toy exporter, with garment and apparel manufacturing forming the backbone of our economy. Li Ka-shing, one of the richest men in Asia with an estimated net worth of $30 billion, started out as a factory man, a supplier of hand-knit plastic flowers, before he moved into property development, container port operation, mass transportation, retailing, telecommunications, and much else.
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But in the early 1980s, Hong Kong’s manufacturing cluster imploded. Factories moved to mainland China and, with them, manufacturing jobs. They first moved across the border to Shenzhen, then to Guangdong Province, and then to the rest of China. Unemployment in Hong Kong soared, crushing the optimism that had characterized residents for so many years. “In the year of my graduation from college, my classmates were speaking of the need to acquire new skills to remain self-sufficient. That was before we had landed our first jobs. To survive, we told ourselves, we had to reinvent.
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And Hong Kong did just that. It cast aside its former manufacturing and colonial identity and reinvented itself as a financial and logistics hub for the region. That reinvention of Hong Kong was where I grew up. It happened at the time when policy makers throughout the world were singularly praising outsourcing as “efficient.” It all happened before any free-market economist became alarmed that emerging market firms might one day catch up with established ones in the West. It was an era of unbridled trust in globalization. But for us Hong Kongers, including myself, it was the age of distrust. Everyone I spoke to yearned for stability and continuity. I wanted to find out how to achieve just that.”
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