economy. High tech provides the imagination, to be sure, but other firms provide the daily bread.
And then also, no tech, low tech, and middle tech provide the profits to finance high tech. Contrary to what most people believe, high tech is distinctly unprofitable for a long time. The world's computer industry ran at a heavy overall loss every year for thirty years; it did not break even until the early 1970s. IBM, to be sure, made a lot of money; and a few other—primarily U.S.—computer makers moved into the black during the 1960s. But these profits were more than offset by the heavy losses of the big electric-apparatus makers: GE, Westinghouse, Siemens, Phillips, RCA, and others. Similarly, it will be at least another ten years before either the biogenetic industry or robot makers as a whole break even, and probably just as long before the microcomputer industry overall makes any money. During that period the no-tech, low-tech, and middle-tech ventures provide the profit stream to finance the capital needs of high tech. Without them, there is unlikely to be enough capital available.
So far, however, there is little recognition of these facts to be found in Europe, and none among European governments. Things may change. Our own entrepreneurial surge started some fifteen years ago. Western Europe is by and large some fifteen years behind the most important U.S. demographic trends—the baby boom, the baby bust, and the explosion in college education.
In the United States these very trends are surely contributing factors in the renewal of entrepreneurship. With the tremendous number of educated baby-boomers already in good jobs, opportunities in the big companies and in government are beginning to be scarce and young people entering the labor force are willing and eager to join small and new ventures. In Europe, the baby-boomers are just hitting the market.
So far, however, European governments are still hostile to entrepreneurs other than in high-tech areas (in France contemptuous to boot). European tax laws, for instance, penalize them and restrict their access to capital and credit. But European society also discourages people, and especially the educated young, from doing anything so “uncouth” as going to work for anyone but a government agency or a big, established company. Unless this changes—and so far there are few signs of this—the infatuation with high-tech entrepreneurship will neither revive the ailing European economies nor even provide much high tech. It must end the way an earlier European high-tech infatuation, Concorde, ended: a very little gloire, an ocean of red ink, but neither jobs nor technological leadership.
(1984)
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