The knowledge economy
Roberto Mangabeira Unger (Author)
"Revolutionary account of the transformative potential of the knowledge economy Adam Smith and Karl Marx recognized that the best way to understand the economy is to study the most advanced practice of production. Today that practice is no longer conventional manufacturing: it is the radically innovative vanguard known as the knowledge economy. In every part of the production system it remains a fringe excluding the vast majority of workers and businesses. This book explores the hidden nature of the knowledge economy and its possible futures. The confinement of the knowledge economy to these insular vanguards has become a driver of economic stagnation and inequality throughout the world. Traditional mass production has stopped working as a shortcut to economic growth. But the alternative--a deepened and socially inclusive form of the knowledge economy--continues to lie beyond reach in even the richest countries. The shape of contemporary politics on both the left and the right reflects a failure to come to terms with this dilemma and to overcome it. Unger explains the knowledge economy in the truncated and confined form that it has today and proposes the way to a knowledge economy for the many: changes not just in economic institutions but also in education, culture, and politics. Just as Smith and Marx did in their time, he uses an understanding of the most advanced practice of production to rethink both economics and the economy as a whole"-- Provided by publisher
vi, 298 pages ; 22 cm
9781788734974, 1788734971
1050279840
1. The most advanced practice of production
2. The knowledge economy: its characteristics described at the level of management and production engineering
3. The deep structure of the knowledge economy: relaxing or reversing the constraint of diminishing marginal returns
4. The deep structure of the knowledge economy: production, imagination, and cooperation
5. The deep structure of the knowledge economy: trust, discretion, and the moral culture of production
6. The confinement of the knowledge economy: the fact and the riddle
7. Pseudo-vanguardism and hyper-insularity
8. Precarious employment
9. The confinement of the knowledge economy: the consequences for economic stagnation and inequality
10. The confinement of the knowledge economy: the beginning of an explanation
11. Making the knowledge economy inclusive: the cognitive-educational requirements
12. Making the knowledge economy inclusive: the social-moral requirements
13. Making the knowledge economy inclusive: the legal-institutional requirements
14. Background incitements: generalized experimentalism and high-energy democracy
15. Inclusive vanguardism and the dilemma of economic development
16. Inclusive vanguardism and the political economy of the rich countries
17. Growth, crisis and successive breakthroughs of the constraints on supply and demand: the larger economic meaning of inclusive vanguardism / The enigma of supply and demand
Contrast to Kynes's teaching
The spectrum of breakthroughs in the constraints on demand
The spectrum of breakthroughs in the constraints on supply
18. Economics and the knowledge economy / The imperative of structural vision
The large-scale history of social and economic thought: truncating and evading structural vision
Reckoning with post-marginalist economics: the disconnection between theory and empiricism
Reckoning with post-marginalist economics: the deficit of institutional imagination
Reckoning with post-marginalist economics: the theory of production subordinated to the theory of exchange
Reckoning with post-marginalist economics: the lack of an account of the diversity of the material from which competititve selection selects
Uses and limits of Keynes's heresy
Uses and limits of the example provided by pre-marginalist economics
Two ways to develop the needed ideas: from within the established economics and from outside it
19. The higher purpose of the inclusive knowledge economy
Index
Includes index