What has befallen the West’s blue-collar workforce in the last generation is the shift of routine physical tasks to the factory floors of the developing world. This was enabled by the relentless drop in the cost of transport. What steam did in the nineteenth century, aeroplanes, supertankers and mechanised ports did for the last third of the twentieth century. The explosion of communications technology in the twenty-first century is enabling Western companies to do precisely the same in the knowledge economy today.
