The Knowledge Economy

Description

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. This book explores the hidden nature of the knowledge economy and its possible futures. In every part of the production system, the knowledge economy remains a fringe excluding the vast majority of workers and businesses. This confinement 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. Unger sets out the route 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.

Roberto Mangabeira Unger is one of the leading philosophers and social thinkers of the present. He is the author of many titles including including False Necessity, Democracy Realized, The Left Alternative, and The Religion of the Future.

A restless visionary. * New York Times * 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 * One of the few living philosophers whose thinking has the range of the great philosophers of the past. * Times Higher Education Supplement * 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 * A philosophical mind out of the Third World turning the tables, to become a synoptist and seer of the First. -- Perry Anderson Brazil's answer to John Stuart Mill ... a political philosopher extraordinaire. * Chronicle of Higher Education * His work may someday make possible a new national romance, and a hitherto undreamt-of national future. -- Richard Rorty