Drei Stadien der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung

Manufacturing Stage
Producing Stage
Service Stage

Fisher, Allan G.B. (1935). The Clash of Progress and Security. London: Macmillan & Co. S.27f.

Though we cannot predict in detail the nature of the new goods and services which a community with rising income-standards will wish to purchase, observation of the expenditure habits of people who are already wealthy, aided by general reasoning, enables us to make some safe generalisations about what is likely to occur when poor communities find that they can spend more than they have been in the habit of spending in the past. In seeking for such generalisations, it will be convenient to suggest a bird’s-eye view of world economic history, in three main stages, which will assist us to distinguish in broad outline the character of the changes which increased wealth demands.

(i) In the primary producing stage, a stage beyond which large areas of the world have
not yet passed, agricultural and pastoral occupatiens were the most important. Many
important, improvements in production technique took place during this period,
but the Malthusian population pressure was usually a real thing and increases in
food supply were eagerly desired on account of the constant dread of famine.
(ii) In the manufacturing or industrial or secondary producing stage, agriculture became
relatively less important, and the production of textiles, of iron and steel products and
of other manufactured goods offered rapidly widening opportunities for
employment and investment.
(iii) The „tertiary“ stage begins in the twentieth century. In the popular phrase the
problems of production in manufacturing seem now to have been solved; it becomes
possible to divert an increasing proportion of human time and ‚effort and of capital
equipment into the production of goods and services, which do not fall readily, in the
ordinary sense of the word, into either of the categories of primary or secondary
production, and which are scarcely ever included in statistics of foreign trade, namely, facilities for travel, amusements of various kinds, governmental and other personal and intangible services, flowers, music, art, literature, education, science, philosophy and the like.