Transitioning from a knowledge economy to a knowledge society

The “Knowledge Economy” has been a watchword from Singapore to Spain to Silicon Valley, which has become the epicenter of this economic and educational ecosystem.

The basic idea: As the relative economic importance of agriculture, extractive industries and mass-production manufacturing declines, these sectors need to be replaced by higher-skill activities such as information technology, bio-technology, healthcare and customized manufacturing.

{mosads}The Knowledge Economy has been beneficial in many ways. There has been exponential growth in college and university enrollment around the world. Great wealth has been created. Human wellbeing has improved.

But inequality has increased, reaching record levels in the United States, where wealth distribution is now more unequal than in India, Russia and Indonesia.

That is why, with the help of Congress’ policymaking and Silicon Valley’s culture and commerce, it’s time to move forward from the Knowledge Economy to the Knowledge Society. Now that the best jobs require high levels of education and training, we need to make sure that lifelong learning is accessible and appreciated, not only because it enriches our economies but because it ennobles our lives.

What has gone wrong with the Knowledge Economy, and how can the Knowledge Society make it right?

First, to succeed in the Knowledge Economy, you must make a significant investment in the right kind of education. Over 40 years, the costs of higher education have increased by 13 to 24-fold. Degrees in engineering and science return more than degrees in social sciences, arts and humanities, and Ivy League graduates earn more than those from less leafy institutions.

Second, the knowledge economy generates fewer jobs than the old industrial economy. For example, one of the most valuable companies as measured by market capitalization is Apple, with about 100,000 employees worldwide. In contrast, General Motors, which regularly topped the Fortune 500 list from the 1950s through the 1980s, directly employed over 850,000 people worldwide at its peak in 1979. In the downside of technological change, the low-skill service economy is also growing, with Wal-Mart and MacDonald’s among the world’s largest employers, and   automation and artificial intelligence may eliminate even more jobs.

Therefore, we need to go beyond the Knowledge Economy to create the Knowledge Society. While knowledge is the main engine of wealth creation, the Knowledge Society would take this concept several steps further. People would be both producers and consumers of knowledge, just as we currently produce and consume goods and services. Knowledge would be essential to our leisure and civic life as well as our work.

How do we create such a society?

First, provide quality education, beginning at birth. There is growing evidence that providing support to very young children from low-income families can improve their cognitive development, somewhat levelling the playing field when they reach school age.

K-12 education systems would break free from the tyranny of academic disciplines. They’d develop core skills, such as logic and reasoning, verbal and written communication, and mathematics, with an emphasis on computation, probability and statistics. Inter-disciplinary curricula would explore big ideas about the universe and humanity’s place in it. Physical exercise, artistic activities, citizenship and ethics would be woven into curricular and extra-curricular learning, requiring longer school days.

Education would encourage young people to become independent, lifelong learners, and higher education would transform itself into the lifelong learning sector. Colleges and Universities would make greater use of technology, creating flexible learning opportunities across an adult lifetime, thereby making higher education more affordable and accessible.

Like a high-tech startup. the Knowledge Society would establish new, open economic models that would reward learning and creativity. Two recent developments offer glimpses of this future.

First, embedded within the virtual currency bitcoin and its blockchain technology is the possibility of creating new money by solving mathematical puzzles – “bitcoin mining.” This protects the integrity of the system by farming out the verification process for transactions to individuals or organizations created to do this. New bitcoins reward the first “miner” who solves the puzzle, translating new knowledge into wealth.

The second technology lies at the intersection of crowd sourcing and “gamification” (using games for education and research). Fold.it was created nearly 10 years ago by George Washington University to crowdsource research into protein-folding – the process by which a protein assumes its functional shape — through a video game. Fold.it has attracted hundreds of thousands of players, many of whom, have made significant scientific contributions as volunteers without scientific training. Massive multiplayer online games, set in virtual reality, could unlock new concepts, particularly in the social and behavioral sciences, such as ideas for alleviating poverty, stopping the spread of infectious diseases, or preventing the next financial crisis.

Creating Silicon Valley required vision and courage. So will conceiving the Knowledge Society.

Stavros N. Yiannouka is the CEO of the World Innovation Summit for Education, an international, multi-sectoral platform for developing new approaches to education, established by Qatar Foundation.

The views expressed by this author are their own and are not the views of The Hill.