The Knowledge Economy: A Critique of the Dominant View
americanaffairsjournal.org
The Knowledge Economy: A Critique of the Dominant View
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Re: The Knowledge Economy: A Critique of the Dominant View
#2This is written in the same convoluted style as a New York Review of Books literature review; it's confusing and seems to be more about proving the author's intelligence than making a point. When the article (finally) comes to the point, the author overstates its significance. He says that Romer was wrong, but then admits Romer was mostly correct, with a few addenda which Romer may have thought too obvious to bother with.
Re: The Knowledge Economy: A Critique of the Dominant View
#3I gave up wading through all that prose....
A few economic ideas that come to mind which I think are not reflected by how our economy works (and fails to work):
If you think of the raw unrecovered resources of Earth, our solar system, and beyond, as an inheritance that humans have received without any merit of our own, then in principle it would seem that an economic system could benefit all of us without any redistribution taking place.
For instance, paying everyone equally from auction proceeds of new resource rights.
Similarly with intellectual property, incentives to innovate are both useful and often earned. But hard intellectual property laws are also harmful in blocking (even if temporarily) directions that others may have been likely to also benefit from.
A fix might be to assign a small percentage of revenue or profits on ideas protected by IP to a similar equally dispersed fund.
That funding would reflect the cost of society to temporarily give up the rights of others to independently discover and monetize protected innovations, and the cost of providing that protection.
The idea that the human race inherits open ended physical and intellectual terrain, but that inheritance is unequally divided, seems tragic.
I am not in any way overlooking the efforts made to uncover ideas or utilize new resources, or the need for those that do that work to benefit directly from that work.
Re: The Knowledge Economy: A Critique of the Dominant View
#4I gave up wading through all that prose.... A few economic ideas that come to mind which I think are not reflected by how our economy works (and fails to work): If you think of the raw unrecovered resources of Earth, our solar system, and beyond, as an inheritance that humans have received without any merit of our own, then in principle it would seem that an economic system could benefit all of us without any redistr…
I'm not convinced intellectual property encourages innovation at all. People needing a solution to a problem encourages innovation, intellectual property law sometimes lets people create arbitrage on top of that but usually when the profit becomes significant and the original problem is solved the innovation stops.
Re: The Knowledge Economy: A Critique of the Dominant View
#5Expansionary monetary policy has been fueling a controlled economic decline by concentrating wealth and disguising it as growth.
This has led to extreme inconsistencies in the perceived value of money which has become completely detached from productivity or real value.
Media echo chambers are failing to hide these inconsistencies though they did a much better job at insulating the elite from the ideas of the masses than the other way round.
The masses perceive the modern economy and society as an incoherent fictions. In their struggle to make sense of this incoherence, the masses assume that the elites are intentionally conspiring against them. The masses don't understand that the elites are simply delusional.
Unlike the masses, the elites don't feel any disconnect between their experienced reality and mainstream social narratives. The problems in our society are so massive and so obvious that the masses cannot imagine that the elites could possibly not notice them; so they think that the elites must be pretending, they must be conspiring.
There is no conspiracy by the elite. It's just plain old delusion backed self-serving optimism bounced around within echo chambers.
Re: The Knowledge Economy: A Critique of the Dominant View
#6So I've been studying Unger for about four years now through my political activism. He is verbose in his language but once you get used to it you can see his brilliance.
His core arguments on the KE are as follows:
- It is creating a schism in the American workforce, and those on the outside lack access to the necessary educational institutions to ever catch up.
- Our IP laws are stagnating our economic development by keeping it isolated to a handful of companies in each industry vertical. Compared to our past this prevents transitioning to an entirely new mode of production. Compare that to history - if you wanted to open a loom factory during the industrial rev. you had access to the loom tech. Not the case today. There's also no shortcut like there was in the past. E.g. Put a farmer in a factory assembly line is NBD. Put a plant worker behind a laptop and ask him to write a script? Not happening.
--- Platform companies only have their dominion because an IP loophole states the individual's data is not their property. We make our data our property and companies like FB/Google struggle to retain their power.
- It's a form of work that utilizes the greatest human power, imagination.
- Under the right political structures this form of work ushers in a new human era. Under the current it stagnates our potential.
Happy to answer specifics if anyone has any questions about his work/perspective.
Re: The Knowledge Economy: A Critique of the Dominant View
#7So I've been studying Unger for about four years now through my political activism. He is verbose in his language but once you get used to it you can see his brilliance. His core arguments on the KE are as follows: - It is creating a schism in the American workforce, and those on the outside lack access to the necessary educational institutions to ever catch up. - Our IP laws are stagnating our economic development b…
What are the "right political structures"? Genuine question. I tend to agree with a lot of the above statements but I'm just not sure where we go from here.
Re: The Knowledge Economy: A Critique of the Dominant View
#8So I've been studying Unger for about four years now through my political activism. He is verbose in his language but once you get used to it you can see his brilliance. His core arguments on the KE are as follows: - It is creating a schism in the American workforce, and those on the outside lack access to the necessary educational institutions to ever catch up. - Our IP laws are stagnating our economic development b…
> It is creating a schism in the American workforce, and those on the outside lack access to the necessary educational institutions to ever catch up.
The implicit idea of offering a transition to knowledge work as a means for people who have been economically shut out to catch up is a misreading of the situation.
An economy must consist of more than just knowledge workers. If a guy who's stuck stocking shelves in a supermarket gets an education and moves up to a career working at a keyboard, those supermarket shelves still need to be stocked. The supermarket will need to hire someone else to fill that dead end job, and will need to do that again (and again) when/if the next guy with the dead end job gets training and moves up. Repeat.
Repeat for every hands on economic sector that treats its workforce poorly.
As long as low-status need to be done to keep civilization running by keeping food on the shelves, there will be people who cannot be knowledge workers. If there is a solution to help people who do hands-on work catch up, it involves paying them more for the jobs that must be done rather than training them to do other work.
(This does not apply to transitioning workers out of dying industries -- retraining people in this situation is the only reasonable option.)
Re: The Knowledge Economy: A Critique of the Dominant View
#9So I've been studying Unger for about four years now through my political activism. He is verbose in his language but once you get used to it you can see his brilliance. His core arguments on the KE are as follows: - It is creating a schism in the American workforce, and those on the outside lack access to the necessary educational institutions to ever catch up. - Our IP laws are stagnating our economic development b…
> It is creating a schism in the American workforce, and those on the outside lack access to the necessary educational institutions to ever catch up. The implicit idea of offering a transition to knowledge work as a means for people who have been economically shut out to catch up is a misreading of the situation. An economy must consist of more than just knowledge workers. If a guy who's stuck stocking shelves in a s…
I don't agree that it's a misreading.
Your point that there are hierarchies within the skill set of various tasks is true, however the argument isn't that everyone needs to be a KE worker - it's that everyone needs the opportunity to be one. Presently that is not the case, many are completely shutout simply because of birth lottery.
A core part of Unger's argument is the expansion of a vital suite of protections for all people. E.g. if everyone has access to universal healthcare, greatly expanding public housing verticals, ample opportunities to retrain and direct their lives it fundamentally changes the nature of our relationship to work.
The grocery store job is only dead-end now because our well being is entirely dependent on our ability to generate capital. In this reimagined future it might be the perfect job for a new mom (or dad) who wants to focus on spending as much time as possible with their child while still having some human interaction outside the house.
If everyone is capable of being a KE worker, it doesn't mean they will be. When and if they want to they can.
Re: The Knowledge Economy: A Critique of the Dominant View
#10So I've been studying Unger for about four years now through my political activism. He is verbose in his language but once you get used to it you can see his brilliance. His core arguments on the KE are as follows: - It is creating a schism in the American workforce, and those on the outside lack access to the necessary educational institutions to ever catch up. - Our IP laws are stagnating our economic development b…
> It is creating a schism in the American workforce, and those on the outside lack access to the necessary educational institutions to ever catch up. The implicit idea of offering a transition to knowledge work as a means for people who have been economically shut out to catch up is a misreading of the situation. An economy must consist of more than just knowledge workers. If a guy who's stuck stocking shelves in a s…
> An economy must consist of more than just knowledge workers. If a guy who's stuck stocking shelves in a supermarket gets an education and moves up to a career working at a keyboard, those supermarket shelves still need to be stocked.
Sure, but if the reason he stopped working as a supermarket shelf-stocker and got an education to move up is that shelf-stockers were in decreasing demand because of shelf-stocking robots or because of workers displaced from other non-intellectual labor because of robots, the shelves are going to be stocked, and he isn't needed to do that.