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.
About the author
Roberto Mangabeira Unger is one of the leading philosophers and political thinkers in the world today. Verso has published much of his writing. The Knowledge Economy applies to the analysis of our economic present and future a way of thinking prefigured in his earlier book, Free Trade Reimagined: The World Division of Labor and the Method of Economics, as well as in his central work in social theory, False Necessity.
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