there is no knowledge economy 29 July 07

Every single paper on the knowledge economy that I’ve read – and that’s, oh, several this week – starts with some hand-wringing about definitions and measurements. That’s because there is no unifying discipline, only a bunch of sociologists, economists, management consultants and bulgy-eyed washington world-controllers each trying to capture the exchange of human resourcefulness, knock it down and drag it back to their cave.

All that is represented by the term ‘knowledge economy’ is a general desire to bring into traditional economic modelling some representation of the importance of knowledge. Sometimes this is an effort to say something useful about the growth of industries that handle knowledge as a product. Sometimes they’re trying to get at the increasing abstraction of the workplace and the fact that these days you are more likely to model the behaviour of your machinery than to actually touch it. Usually the two are muddled together, as in this lovely definition from the Annual Review of Sociology:

We define the knowledge economy as production and services based on knowledge-intensive activities that contribute to an accelerated pace of technological and scientific advance as well as equally rapid obsolescence.

or in other words:

We define the knowledge economy as activities which involve knowledge, described in a way that sounds a bit like economics. Also, new stuff!

oddly, the exact same description of the new world is offered by an athletic scholar in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure:

Everything’s different, yet the same. Things are more moderner than before, bigger, and yet smaller. It’s computers. (pause) San Dimas High School Football Rules!

Which is as good a basis for setting international development policy as anything to be found in the knowledge economy literature.