The Technical Chamber of Greece
I’m in Athens today, courtesy of the Technical Chamber of Greece. They’re hosting a conference on the knowledge economy, and they have kindly invited me to give the keynote address. Because this invitation came, in part, because of Digital Phoenix, and because my hosts asked me to discuss the past 10-15 years of the global knowledge economy and the lessons that Greece should learn from it, I chose the title “Phoenix Rising over the Aegean? Economic Lessons of the Early Information Age.” I also promised the attendees that I would make copies of both my prepared remarks and my PowerPoint slides available on The Informationist. If they’re not here yet, they will be soon.
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Bruce:
Wonderful lecture – except my coffee got cold while reading it – something that does not happen when I have the pleasure to listen in person.
OK – You assert that “The country that figures out how to move its people around—from job to job and from city to city—fastest, will be best positioned to take the lead in every single new economic opportunity. Lifelong education, retraining, and employment mobility are the keys to lubricating our systems of human capital. So I certainly recommend that every country invest in education at all levels, and remove all barriers to effective competition to provide both children and adults with the finest education available…” well I agree – BUT – there is a hidden step here.
Essentially, after the first spurts of information infrastructure catch-up – lots and lots of places are knowledge economy interconnected – so the local barriers to whatever become less and less important. However, the local culture of educational motivation will become the critical element that distinguishes between one local and another.
It is neither access to education nor content of education that will set the ultimate parameters to competition (knowledge economy participation) but the quality of the cooperative effort. If mental health perturbations compete with productivity for the bandwidth attention of the populace – meaning if transient information consumption activities dominate the human capital investment by – for example surfing pornography, social chat rooms, group games, etc. – then the net productivity of the local information state will fail to successfully compete.
Simply stated, local mental health will play a key role in the competitive index for the information economy. Simply transplanting and enriching educational content opportunity will provide limited benefits. Now, to the best of my knowledge, the key to successful mental health is personal intervention – so there is a basic local infrastructure that silently works to support or to suppress productive integration into the knowledge economy.
Chaim Scheff
Thanks, Chaim--and sorry about the coffee.
You are absolutely right that local culture will play a significant role. IMHO, however, that role will lie in determining who succeeds and who fails, how many hurdles each country must overcome, and what implementational steps are necessary to get from “here” to “there.” Communities with long traditions of educational commitment--say Jewish, Japanese, or Brahmin--may find the transition easier than others. Then again, excellent legacy systems are often the biggest hurdles to reform. In other words, I believe that all countries should share an ultimate goal, but I would advise significant cultural specificity in devising programs to reach it.
I prefer to keep a level playing field. Regardless of the particular sociological distribution of scholars and journeymen in any culture, the infrastructure of knowledge capital globalization removes barriers and creates caste mobility on an unusual scale. Accordingly, it is the local factors, that influence individuals to take advantage of this opportunity (or to abuse it), that will determine the building blocks of group dynamics; which in turn dominate project success.
That is not to presume that single-minded goal-oriented group-mind focus is the key to success – since innovations are generally the stuff that comes to be born along the way – so rigidity selects adiabatic progress over quantum progress; the optimization of which depends on the specific economic climate of the field of the development.
Nevertheless, what seems to be emerging is that individuals emerge who successfully emigrate into the globalization milieu, and then success depends on their respective integration into economically viable invisible colleges, collaborations, cooperatives, virtual corporations, and the likes. We know this to be true – since it has been the case for programmers – who are equally likely to be academic theorists or down-home hackers.
As for the latency of cultural legacy systems – I think that Heisenberg put it best – that “new ideas do not convince the holders of old ideas – but those with the old ideas die off first”. Returning to the knowledge capital culture – if the local proximate climate is not conducive to coalescence of collaborations – then the infrastructure will allow the participants to virtually migrate to better partnerships.
However, as the system evolves – there will be less of a loyalty to an incidental local alliance – since participants will increasingly be spending their time in working relationships that have no particular geographic focus. I think that this means that the knowledge economy is at odds with the nation-state – much the same was as the multinational corporation has become an extra-national organization – without loyalty to any specific taxation authority!
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