Talk:Service industries

I've just re-created this. Can I request that, rather than immediately deleting it, editors indicate what is missing, so that it can be fixed JQ (talk) 03:19, 31 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

@John Quiggin: I assume the problem were the missing citations. If I understand the article right, your argument that service industries and tertiary sector are not synonyms relies on certain points that need citations:

The tertiary sector is/was defined narrowly as "transporting, distributing and selling goods produced in the manufacturing". ==> Needs a reference
There are now industries that don’t fit this definition (rather obvious, examples given).
These new industries are not included in (newer) definitions of tertiary sector ==> needs a reference
The combination of the "old" tertiary sector industries and the "new" ones are called as a whole "service industries" ==> needs a reference.

Thanks, --S.K. (talk) 08:07, 31 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

This is pretty much right. It would be more accurate to say that the term "tertiary" only makes sense in the context of the supply chain in an industrial economy, where it follows on from primary and secondary. When the three-sector model was developed in early C20, other services weren't considered important enough to treat separately, so they were thrown into the tertiary sector. This was obviously inadequate by 1980, so quaternary and quinary sectors were shoehorned in - even though these terms make no logical sense in the context of a supply chain. The three-sector model has been pretty much abandoned by serious economists since the rise of the information economy, but this is the kind of fact for which it is impossible to find a citation.JQ (talk) 03:23, 1 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, do I understand it correctly then, that the naming as primary, secondary, tertiary has/had a semantic based on the supply/value chain and is not "just" a clustering/grouping by common characteristics? And with the introduction of quaternary, quinary sectors this semantics were broken? If so, this probably should be described better in the article Three-sector model, that this flow was part of the concept. And that the new industries broke that concept and the extensions are just patchwork. --S.K. (talk) 12:19, 1 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I've been working a bit on Three-sector model trying to clarify this. The main problem is getting everything cited. The sources used in that article are very old books, and I don't have physical access to a library to find good cites. JQ (talk) 00:42, 2 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]