ARNOLD KLING
August 14, 2011
The Top Political Contributors
August 11, 2011
Gender and the New Commanding Heights
August 11, 2011
Jamie Galbraith Makes an Assumption
August 11, 2011
Macroeconometrics: The Science of Hubris
August 10, 2011
Real and Nominal Bond Yields
BRYAN CAPLAN
August 14, 2011
The Effect of Thumb Sucking on Income
August 12, 2011
The Voice of Cold, Hard Truth to All Would-Be Educators
August 12, 2011
Ability, Morality, and Prosperity: A Paper and a Report
August 11, 2011
The Theory of Time and Frittering
August 10, 2011
Male Variance and the Remnants of the Gender Gap
DAVID HENDERSON
August 9, 2011
Hayek in "Unbroken", Part Two
August 8, 2011
Hayek in "Unbroken"
August 5, 2011
James Bovard on the Peace Corps
August 4, 2011
Summers Way Off on FDR and 1941
August 3, 2011
The "Amazon" Tax
SHARE
To me, it makes sense the changes were larger between 1980 and 2000, many new technologies came online during that time, 2000 to 2010 saw the maturation of the 1980-2000 technologies, but not as many new ones.
Arnold,
You believe that the dispersion of knowledge means we need a dispersion of authority, decision-making, etc. and I tend to agree.
How is it then that you think extreme wealth concentration makes sense? If knowledge is dispersed and knowledge/expertise have something to do with wealth creation then I would think wealth would become more dispersed. Quite the opposite - it appears fewer and fewer people add value in the world.
How do you reconcile that?
Part of what we are observing (in the statistics formats) may be only the dispersion of INFORMATION, and while information is the base of most knowledge information is not knowledge.
People may have to be informed to function, but not necessarily need have knowledge of their function.
Information and knowledge are related but are not the same thing. Information is defined as data while knowledge is defined as the understanding of the implications of having data.
It would be theoretically possible to have a society with thousands of different occupations, but where everybody works for the same firm and this firm is onwed by a single entrepreneur that makes all the entrepreneurial decisions. In this hypothetical society, only the knowledge of this entrepreneur would be utilized. That would be a centrally planned society.
In the real world, the capacity to discover knowledge is related to the capacity of aquiring information, as result, if information is dispersed, so is knowledge. In a society based on division of labor, knowledge is always transmitted, usually though the price system. While in a society of self suficient farmers, the production and consumption plans of different farmers don`t need to be coordinated and knowledge is not transmitted, but is dispersed since each farmer has knowledge regarding his individual conditions. So, even in a society of one profession, knowledge is dispersed but not transmitted, trade and specialization imply in the transmission of knolwedge.
The reduction in the number of new profession types is a reflection of the reduction in the rate of economic progress in the united states between 2000 and 2010 compared to the 1980-2000 period. The rate of transmission of knowledge is decreasing, maybe because there isn`t as much new knowledge to be transmitted (fewer new technologies), or because of the worse macroeconomic conditions of the united states during the 2000`s.