Economy: Growth

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Thursday 6th December 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Giddens]

My Lords, there was quite an amusing headline in the satirical magazine Private Eye recently, which touches on the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky. It went something like, “After four years of intensive study, the IMF has concluded that austerity leads to austerity”. We can all agree that we now need to focus on growth, but not just any old growth—it has to be environmentally sustainable and evenly spread. There is no point if it benefits only the top 0.1% of income earners.

There is much to agree with in the outstanding report from the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine. We should think in a radical and adventurous way about our economic future. Something utterly dramatic is happening at the cutting edge of manufacture, perhaps equivalent to or much more than Arkwright’s spinning jenny all those years ago: computers have crossed the line from the digital world and are intervening in the world of reality itself. This is perhaps one of the most momentous changes ever to happen in human productive activity. Although it is in its early stages, 3D printing can already make an enormous range of items, from engineering parts to dental crowns. At MIT, Neil Gershenfeld is working on computers that will be able to fabricate not just single items but complete functional systems. For example, his aim is to make a plane that can fly right out of the computer, as he says—and he does not regard this as a Utopian project.

This might be thought to be fanciful but much of it is already here. It is documented in a very detailed book by Chris Anderson called Makers: The New Industrial Revolution. Crucially, it reverses the assumption that manufacture will inevitably be outsourced to low-cost countries.

In Barcelona, where youth unemployment is more than 50%, the city is setting up digital fabrication workshops across different neighbourhoods, encouraging young people to train in them. The aim, in Gershenfeld’s words, is for the city to be,

“globally connected for knowledge but self-sufficient for what it consumes”.

This, to me, is the cutting edge of what could be a tremendous global revolution. Why should we not think along the same lines for Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool, which brook so large in the noble Lord’s report?