Knowledge and Learning in the Information Age

As Kuznets observed, the distinguishing feature of modern economic growth is the application of scientific knowledge to productive activities. 1 For Kuznets, 'modern' economic growth involved progress since the Industrial Revolution rather than from the Information Revolution. The gathering momentum of the Information Revolution has, however, led many authors to conclude that it represents a qualitative departure from the accumulative and distributive processes involved in 'science-based' economic growth and therefore a new 'epoch' or 'paradigm' for the process of economic growth. 2 Most recently, the examination of the contribution of knowledge to economic growth has focussed upon systemic features of the production and distribution of knowledge and the relation of these features to economic performance. 3 This intellectual trajectory, originating from empirical investigation and a sceptical view of received theory to which many 'heterodox' economic scholars have contributed, has also been the subject of 'revisionist' works in mainstream economic theory. 4 The co-evolution of revisionist and heterodox mainstream theory reflects a common concern with the features of information as an economic commodity and the growing importance of knowledge in productive activities. 4 Mainstream economic theory may be defined as the effort to systematise the understanding of market functions along the lines of investigation specified by Walras and Pareto at the beginning of the 20 th Century. Familiar examples of 'revisionist' contributions within the mainstream include (Krugman 1979)and (Romer 1986). A representative sample of this work including Krugman and Romer's articles is compiled in (Buchanan and Yoon 1994). 5 The current use of the English language to construct terminology like knowledge-based economies or economic growth bears the unfortunate connotation that prior economic formations were steeped in ignorance. In the present context, the proposition that knowledge is of growing importance role in economic activity is simply a reflection of two facts: 1) natural resource endowments, per se, have comparatively little explanatory value in explaining levels of economic welfare or rates of growth and 2) although capital and labour endowments have greater explanatory power, most of this power stems from making 'quality' adjustments reflecting the embodiment of improvements in knowledge in workers and equipment, and the transformation of organisations accompanying these improvements. The evidence for these propositions may be found in 3 A popular manifesto of heterodox scholars such as those in evolutionary economics or science, technology and innovation studies is that mainstream economics treats technological change as exogenous to the economic system. …