The Knowledge Economy

by Roberto Mangabeira Unger

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781788734974
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	03/19/2019
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Roberto Mangabeira Unger is one of the leading philosophers and social thinkers of the present. Verso has published much of his work, including False Necessity, Democracy Realized, The Left Alternative, and most recently The Religion of the Future.

Table of Contents

1 The Most Advanced Practice of Production 1

2 The Knowledge Economy: Its Characteristics Described at the Level of Management and Production Engineering 19

3 The Deep Structure of the Knowledge Economy: Relaxing or Reversing the Constraint of Diminishing Marginal Returns 25

4 The Deep Structure of the Knowledge Economy: Production, Imagination, and Cooperation 35

5 The Deep Structure of the Knowledge Economy: Trust, Discretion, and the Moral Culture of Production 47

6 The Confinement of the Knowledge Economy: The Fact and the Riddle 53

7 Pseudo-Vanguardism and Hyper-Insularity 57

8 Precarious Employment 63

9 The Confinement of the Knowledge Economy: The Consequences for Economic Stagnation and Inequality 71

10 The Confinement of the Knowledge Economy: The Beginning of an Explanation 83

11 Making the Knowledge Economy Inclusive: The Cognitive-Educational Requirements 93

12 Making the Knowledge Economy Inclusive: The Social-Moral Requirements 101

13 Making the Knowledge Economy Inclusive: The Legal-Institutional Requirements 117

14 Background Incitements: Generalized Experimentalism and High-Energy Democracy 137

15 Inclusive Vanguardism and the Dilemma of Economic Development 159

16 Inclusive Vanguardism and the Political Economy of the Rich Countries 175

17 Growth, Crisis, and Successive Breakthroughs of the Constraints on Supply and Demand: The Larger Economic Meaning of Inclusive Vanguardism 189

The enigma of supply and demand 189

Contrast to Keynes's teaching 197

The spectrum of breakthroughs in the constraints on demand 203

The spectrum of breakthroughs in the constraints on supply 214

18 Economics and the Knowledge Economy 227

The imperative of structural vision 227

The large-scale history of social and economic thought: truncating and evading structural vision 233

Reckoning with post-marginalist economics: the disconnection between theory and empiricism 238

Reckoning with post-marginalist economics: the deficit of institutional imagination 243

Reckoning with post-marginalist economics: the theory of production subordinated to the theory of exchange 251

Reckoning with post-marginalist economics: the lack of an account of the diversity of the material from which competitive selection selects 253

Uses and limits of Keynes's heresy 256

Uses and limits of the example provided by pre-marginalist economics 262

Two ways to develop the needed ideas: from within the established economics and from outside it 270

19 The Higher Purpose of the Inclusive Knowledge Economy 277

Index 289

Editorial Reviews

A restless visionary.”
—New York Times

“One of the few living philosophers whose thinking has the range of the great philosophers of the past.”
—Times Higher Education

“A philosophical mind out of the Third World turning the tables, to become a synoptist and seer of the First.”
—Perry Anderson

“The visionary program this new book sets out for universalizing the knowledge economy is not just a nice-to-have, but necessary. The Knowledge Economy is indispensable as a study of how to remedy the political polarization inequality has brought.”
—Martin Sandbu, Financial Times

“An intelligent examination of policy ideas which dare to challenge economic norms.”
—Ruth F. Hunt, Morning Star

“Unger’s work can offer progressives key resources for exposing the false necessity of the American liberal status quo and thinking constructively about a different progressive vision for the United States.”
—Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, The Nation

From the Publisher