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Less-developed countries fail to develop. Wages sink while productivity soars. Industrial heartlands become wastelands. Former allies are at each others' throats. Widening unemployment is inevitable without redeployment into new industries, yet capitalists in thrall to economic ideology pursue spurious investment in consolidation of competitors, corruption of government, and schemes for mulcting investors, with consequent reduction of demand, output, and employment.
Nelson Foote, a sociologist with a Cassandra-like vision of the future, offers an answer in Sharing the Earth, a work begun from field studies on the islands of Trinidad and Tobago. He bases his general theory of development on a new organization of society - professionalism.
Professions constantly spin out new specialties. Paradoxically, the directives taught to generations of managers - eliminate competition, divert profits to uninvolved investors, squeeze suppliers and employees to extract maximum output at minimum cost - inherently deplete wealth. Whereas pursuit of output per hour of labor minimizes employment, professionalization multiplies employment by proliferating services to the limit where the professional: client relation is practiced one to one.
Nelson's professionalist model rests on three insights:
1. Every occupation can become a profession. A profession is less a body of knowledge than a practice based on fundamental principles: education; certification of competence; and relentless improvement of methodology. Above all the client is the focus of the practitioner's obligation, not the shareholder or employer.
2. Six theaters: While development is conventionally conceived as economic development, Nelson reorients development as a process occurring across six theaters, only one of which is economic. Unrelenting immiseration of poor nations can be traced to neglect of the other five - demographic, cultural, educational, political, and familial.
3. Artistry offers poor nations a level playing field, yet adds more value to most products and services than technology, by identifying new sources of client satisfaction and originating unimagined categories of specialty exports.
Nelson, who was the first to use the term "human resources" in its modern sense of investing in the talents of employees, viewed development as synonymous with human development. A professionalist society achieves exactly that equality. The life experiences from which he drew this conclusion - the family farm, academia, shop floors as a member of the CIO, Trinidad, a General Electric think tank where his task was to predict the future - led to his most important prediction: the tenets binding all professions, applied as an organizing principle across an entire community, will lift up even its meekest member, and allow the people of poor countries to leapfrog current development strategies and achieve prosperity within a single generation.
