Authors, notably, Nick O’Donovan in his 2022 book Pursuing the Knowledge Economy: a Sympathetic History of High-skill, High-wage Hubris, as well as an article published in 2020, call into question “the assumptions of knowledge-based growth, and thus the public policy agenda constructed around it.”
“Given what we have learned about knowledge-based growth over the intervening years, public policies advocated in the heyday of the knowledge economy concept [1990s] appear unlikely to generate the kind of outcomes that their proponents once anticipated. It follows that simply doubling-down on a supply-side agenda of labor market deregulation, investment in education and improved digital infrastructure is unlikely to radically change the pace and character of economic growth in developed democracies, in and of itself.”*
There were always well-reasoned critiques of the knowledge economy, such as it merely being window dressing for previous, unjust policies that intended to redistribute wealth upwards.
But I wonder who among these critics predicted the hoarding of the value of knowledge itself which, indeed, might logically follow from an economy that valued knowledge.
In other words, as the knowledge society collapsed around the Global Minority, due to such factors as AI, significant portions of the population, trained to gather and process information by the educational and policy strictures of the past few decades, would be left without income.
Therefore, the fall of knowledge economy in the Global Minority would, as such, create an unforeseen policy crisis. The features of this might include, based on current developments:
- Return to manual labor is “biologically” potentially impossible due to the demographic factor, i.e., an ageing, physically-frail population.† Destitution is the result. Are robots the answer? Recalling past waves of automation, it seems automation was perhaps often first seen as positive by workers (as reducing drudgery) but was later seen in negative ways as it became associated with unemployment.
- Vocational education and training no longer serve any real vocational purposes but as a purely performative, moralizing, effort to instill the work ethic in the soon-to-be-unemployed.
- Mass higher education would no longer be required. Would this mean a return to an early 20thC profile of universities? Where to place the burden of socializing “democratic” citizens?
Political responses:
- Failure to grasp the era of the knowledge economy is over leading to a plethora of unforced policy errors driven by ingrained thinking.
- Little care given to improving the quality of jobs that actually exist; insufficient attention to sectors such as delivery, gig economy, care work.‡
- Seeming rejection of green growth as a formula. While there is debate about whether green growth would actually lead to the decarbonization needed to stop climate change, I am referring to it as a relatively easy-to-understand principle to organize policies that is, potentially, different from knowledge economy.
Notes:
†de Zwart, et al., 1996, Physical workload and the ageing worker: a review of the literature, in: International Archives of Occupational and Environmental Health
‡Edgerton, 2022, Why the everyday economy is the innovation Labour needs, in: Political Quarterly
