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The Knowledge Economy: A Critique of the Dominant View

americanaffairsjournal.org

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Re: The Knowledge Economy: A Critique of the Dominant View

#11

Post by rrivers »

intrepidhero wrote: post #7
rrivers wrote: post #6

So 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.

- Expanding a vital suite of protections to remove survival from employment.

- Reclassification of the laws of property and contract - break from a single market structure to allow multiple markets to operate in tandem. Socialized housing, healthcare, transport alongside privatized video games, widget manufacturing, etc.

- Decoupling of education from municipality taxes, make it federally funded and programmed. Education also becomes lifelong process, the best firms become the best schools.

- Expand access to credit both in the form of capital and technology. Tie finance to the real economy, speculation is good but not in its current form. Most of the money in the stock market stays there, which is antithetical to its purpose of funding the productive agenda of society.

- Open access of technology, revising IP laws to allow a much higher degree of proliferation among emerging verticals.

Re: The Knowledge Economy: A Critique of the Dominant View

#12

Post by gumby »

rrivers wrote: post #6

So 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…

> Compare that to history - if you wanted to open a loom factory during the industrial rev. you had access to the loom tech.

Actually the opposite is true — that’s the origin of guilds. In your specific case, Lowell famously visited England and memorized the important things, writing down what he learned at night, and then returned to set up industrial fabric production in New England.

Re: The Knowledge Economy: A Critique of the Dominant View

#13

Post by pixl97 »

swiley wrote: post #4
Nevermark wrote: post #3

I 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.

Intellectual property should be taxed like normal property.

If course the big difficulty is in determining its value. Currently it is both priceless and worthless.

Re: The Knowledge Economy: A Critique of the Dominant View

#14

Post by redis_mlc »

gumby wrote: post #12
rrivers wrote: post #6

So 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…

> Compare that to history - if you wanted to open a loom factory during the industrial rev. you had access to the loom tech. Actually the opposite is true — that’s the origin of guilds. In your specific case, Lowell famously visited England and memorized the important things, writing down what he learned at night, and then returned to set up industrial fabric production in New England.

Correct, but even more pertinent to HN and this article is the first programming automation using punched cards was done for looms. :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_machine

Re: The Knowledge Economy: A Critique of the Dominant View

#15

Post by redis_mlc »

rrivers wrote: post #6

So 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…

> lack access to the necessary educational institutions to ever catch up.

Correct. A lot of effort is needed to come up with policy to fix this, but although the US is the richest country in history, it's currently one of the weakest in policies.

> Our IP laws are stagnating our economic development

I haven't seen that, though copyright terms are too long and the cloud operators have done everything possible to strip musicians of royalties. (Virtually every Youtube musician's songs have been demonetized to the uploader, not to labels.)

Patreon is literally keeping the arts alive in the US. We'll see where that goes after a private equity firm bought them recently.

> Put a farmer in a factory assembly line is NBD.

Family farmers (and wives) in the US generally have city jobs to finance their farms. To not is perilous.

The interesting labor shortage is airplane mechanics. Corona layoffs, onerous FAA certification rules and very low apprentice pay are decimating that worker group.

> Under the right political structures this form of work ushers in a new human era. Under the current it stagnates our potential.

No policy, no results.

Ironically it's billionaires who are the first to point this out. Just watch any Youtube interview between a mainstream host and a US billionaire - the topic always comes up as the #1 problem facing America.

Re: The Knowledge Economy: A Critique of the Dominant View

#16

Post by logicslave »

US Economy in a nutshell:

1.) Pass NAFTA and a series of laws in the 90s to:

Ship out all jobs that can be shipped out, import cheaper workers that can under cut wages.

2.) Make the argument that the above makes it so that Americans can "retrain" for new jobs. This never happens and has never been proven to happen.

3.) Watch as the average American effective wage plummets, use financial engineering to pump up stocks and the housing markets.

Economic crashes keep occurring as the financial engineering to generate mass wealth destroys the financial health of our companies and families.

4.) Print money to save the country from entering economic depression while the capitalists and people benefitting from the outsourcing of labor become wealthy beyond all belief.

5.) Buy cheap TVs, because thats all we got.

Re: The Knowledge Economy: A Critique of the Dominant View

#17

Post by pksebben »

nickff wrote: post #2

This 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…

having read the (yes, quite long) whole article, I don't see where the author asserts that Romer was "mostly correct". "Mostly cohesive but critically flawed" would be a more accurate description of the author's conclusion.

Re: The Knowledge Economy: A Critique of the Dominant View

#18

Post by pksebben »

rrivers wrote: post #9
bleepblorp wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

not to mention that if we could magically poof 30% of the working age population into KE jobs overnight and still have a significant amount of workers for sticking shelves, because the labor force participation rate is abysmal.

Re: The Knowledge Economy: A Critique of the Dominant View

#19

Post by pksebben »

swiley wrote: post #4
Nevermark wrote: post #3

I 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.

I would love to see a world where your monthly government ethereum check is balanced against some equation like the number of open source PRs merged * repo utilization

Re: The Knowledge Economy: A Critique of the Dominant View

#20

Post by pjmorris »

rrivers wrote: post #6

So 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…

I find your summary to be concise and reasonable, to the degree I follow the article. I'd not heard of Unger before, but think he's brilliant. I found the reading to be a bit of a wade. For that, I'll fault my own lack of background in addition to recognizing that he is a lawyer :)

Where (books, etc) would you recommend starting with Unger? Where did you start? What prompted it?

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