Knowledges, specialisation and economic evolution: modelling the evolving division of human time

INTRODUCTION To study economic evolution we need a clear answer to the question: 'What evolves?'. If we only want to cover limited aspects of the overall process of economic evolution, adequate answers to the question are 'technologies', 'strategies' or 'routines'. But for researchers who want to cover larger parts of the history of economic evolution it is helpful to try out the more general answer that what evolves is 'knowledge'. Unfortunately, this answer is very imprecise and it also leaves open serious ontological and methodological problems (Potts, 2000, pp. 58–60). So Boulding's (1978, p. 33) more cautious 'glimmering' of an answer seems more appropriate: 'what evolves is something very much like knowledge'. This answer gives some direction for research, but it also emphasises the urgent need for a further specification. Not all types of knowledge show the same degree of evolution. In this respect there is a radical difference between the basic knowledge about how to behave economically and the concrete knowledge about how to produce and exchange particular economic goods. The former type of knowledge seems to be pretty universal for Homo sapiens, so it is not the basic economising knowledge that shows permanent evolution. A more likely candidate for evolvable knowledge is found in close relation to the concrete economic activities of production and exchange. Here we do not, however, find knowledge at the Platonic level of abstraction, where it is clearly separated from the workers and their activities. To emphasise this fact we shall introduce the concept of 'knowledges', i.e. bodies of knowledge that are created and learnt for performing the different activities in the system of economic activities. Thus we take the 'fundamentalist' view of Metcalfe (2001a, p. 568) and many others: it is only individuals that know and their knowing is directly or indirectly motivated by their economic activities. According to this view the core area of study are special purpose knowledges that are applicable for particular economic activities. In this and several other respects the concept of knowledges clearly relates to Adam Smith's (1976) analysis of the division of labour. The next question is: 'How do knowledges evolve?'. Here Smith's answer seems to be that knowledges evolve as an automatic consequence of the changing division of labour and that this evolution is a major cause of productivity growth. An alternative and probably better answer implies some degree of decoupling between the change in division …