Service Employment and Material Production

In the previous two chapters we have identified both a trend towards service employment and a trend away from the final consumption of services. We have argued that there is in fact no contradiction here, only a confusion which arises from the use of the word ‘service’ in two different senses. One result of this confusion has been the view that since, to paraphrase Adam Smith, ‘services … perish in the very instant of their performance’, the contribution of service workers to economic welfare is necessarily inconsiderable; if Britain’s problem is ‘too few producers’, then, according to this view, the continued growth of the service sector can only worsen our problem. The intention in this chapter is to show that this position is false.