Moving up the Ladder

There was an interesting article on NPR (yes I sometimes read that too) about mobility in India.  What was interesting to me is that this article says the best way for a person to move up, especially someone who isn't in primary education, is to move from poor to a manufacturing job.  The point of the article is that there is no manufacturing jobs in India.

So this made me think of two things.  First, which countries are the ones that have both services and manufacturing sectors that are robust or growing robustly.  While investing in India can make money it seems like the political stability and future growth prospects are shadowed by this problem.  China doesn't have enough manufacturing jobs and is starting to move to a more service oriented (and high-tech) economy.  This doesn't help the poor, and this could be really bad.  I think this is a good place to look to when considering investments, countries where both areas are growing.

Second, I have often wondered if the world is hamstrung because they see America (a developed economy) and so the citizens want to jump quickly to more advanced economies from simplier less developed economies.  In the 1900's the American economy couldn't just jump to 2000.  This was an advantage, as trailblazing does, to slowly grow into larger shoes.  I fear that this aspiration of emerging economies is driving unnatural growth in a way that significantly divides the populace.  In all countries there is a small number of people who can benefit from such a fast change and most emerging economies have an even worse story to tell with regards to that.  I worry what this could do to those countries.