"History," says Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google, "has shown a correlation between the amount of information available to the average citizen and economic growth." So true! History, it must be said, also shows a correlation between the amount of information available to the average citizen and the increasing prevalence of tattoos, obesity, cappuccino art (the leaf patterns that baristas make with foamed milk) and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; likewise, this information bonanza can also be correlated with the disappearance of progressive rock, old growth forests, and cursive handwriting. In other words, just because you can correlate one trend with another does not make one a cause.
Still, the idea that there's something special — something newly democratizing and empowering about the way we are able to share information at this point in history — is especially tempting. If true, it means that fortune favors the well-informed (and, not uncoincidentally, the avid informers at Google HQ). As Schmidt put it in an op-ed for the Financial Times, "In this global era our real enemies are inflexibility, proprietary systems and 'walled gardens' that let the elite in but leave the rest out."
As much as I love Google and the spectacular convenience of web and database searching, Schmidt is selling a crock of fool’s gold. Yes, if you compare productivity rates before and after the invention of print, information is both a foundation and engine of economic growth; you could make the same point about the invention of language (and some have) and still score a historical truth. But this sort of trivial observation misses a key point. As the economic historian Joel Mokyr puts it, "It is not just what we know, but who knows what we know."
In his fascinating account of the historical origins of the knowledge economy, "The Gifts of Athena," Mokyr notes that the kind of high-minded scientific knowledge that the Enlightenment believed in sharing for the good of all had surprisingly little impact on the industrializing economies until the 19th century.
On the other hand, the technical knowledge that produced wealth was, for obvious reasons, not so carelessly disseminated. Either way, the vast outpouring of knowledge, spread through print and discussed by learned societies and clubs (the social networks of their day) was egalitarian in name only: The feast was enjoyed by the few, and its impact on the many was not always beneficial.
For instance, as Adam Ferguson, the Scottish philosopher (and contemporary of Adam Smith) put it, the new "mechanical arts" of industry required of workers little intellectual capacity: Manufacturers "prosper most where the mind is least consulted." The economic growth that resulted from these advances often reduced the need for skilled labor, creating a sense of "alienation" among workers that Karl Marx saw as justification for revolution.
Does Googlism (info-socialism?) change any of this? Again, history says no. As the Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz have pointed out, the recent history of economic growth can be seen as a "relentless" race between technological demand and educational supply. When educational attainment began to stagnate in the U.S. during the 1980s, the consequence was an economy continuing to grow through technological innovation at the expense of growing wage inequality. For much of the 20th century, the U.S. had been able to oversupply the market with educated workers, thus keeping wage differentials low; but, in the last 30 years, the value of being a master of the knowledge economy has skyrocketed (again with sometimes dubious benefit to the many).
The aggregate supply of information to the average citizen had nothing to do with any of this. There has been more information at our fingertips in the past 30 years than at any point in the of history of mankind. But accessing it and sharing it does not mean understanding what it means or what to do with it.
In the recently published and highly entertaining compendium, "Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?" (edited by John Brockman), several thinkers use the image of a deluge or a flood to describe the online informationscape. George Dyson, a historian of science, suggests that the flood has forced us to turn from being hunter-gatherers of information to hunter-discarders. The problem of knowledge is not a lack but rather an excess of information. Jon Kleinberg, a professor of computer science at Cornell University, notes that interacting even with the mundane online world requires the tools of traditional scholarship, and that we need to go beyond "computer literacy" to "conveying the much more complex skill of 'information literacy' to the very young."
On this score, the egalitarian dreams of Schmidt and Google seem remote from a new economic Enlightenment or enlightenment of any sort. A study commissioned several years ago by the British Library found that the generation that grew up with their sense of information shaped by the Internet — Generation Google — didn’t really know how to search, and couldn’t really evaluate what they ended up finding. More troubling, they didn’t even know that they didn’t know how to do any of this. Solve that, Google.
Still, the idea that there's something special — something newly democratizing and empowering about the way we are able to share information at this point in history — is especially tempting. If true, it means that fortune favors the well-informed (and, not uncoincidentally, the avid informers at Google HQ). As Schmidt put it in an op-ed for the Financial Times, "In this global era our real enemies are inflexibility, proprietary systems and 'walled gardens' that let the elite in but leave the rest out."
As much as I love Google and the spectacular convenience of web and database searching, Schmidt is selling a crock of fool’s gold. Yes, if you compare productivity rates before and after the invention of print, information is both a foundation and engine of economic growth; you could make the same point about the invention of language (and some have) and still score a historical truth. But this sort of trivial observation misses a key point. As the economic historian Joel Mokyr puts it, "It is not just what we know, but who knows what we know."
In his fascinating account of the historical origins of the knowledge economy, "The Gifts of Athena," Mokyr notes that the kind of high-minded scientific knowledge that the Enlightenment believed in sharing for the good of all had surprisingly little impact on the industrializing economies until the 19th century.
On the other hand, the technical knowledge that produced wealth was, for obvious reasons, not so carelessly disseminated. Either way, the vast outpouring of knowledge, spread through print and discussed by learned societies and clubs (the social networks of their day) was egalitarian in name only: The feast was enjoyed by the few, and its impact on the many was not always beneficial.
For instance, as Adam Ferguson, the Scottish philosopher (and contemporary of Adam Smith) put it, the new "mechanical arts" of industry required of workers little intellectual capacity: Manufacturers "prosper most where the mind is least consulted." The economic growth that resulted from these advances often reduced the need for skilled labor, creating a sense of "alienation" among workers that Karl Marx saw as justification for revolution.
Does Googlism (info-socialism?) change any of this? Again, history says no. As the Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz have pointed out, the recent history of economic growth can be seen as a "relentless" race between technological demand and educational supply. When educational attainment began to stagnate in the U.S. during the 1980s, the consequence was an economy continuing to grow through technological innovation at the expense of growing wage inequality. For much of the 20th century, the U.S. had been able to oversupply the market with educated workers, thus keeping wage differentials low; but, in the last 30 years, the value of being a master of the knowledge economy has skyrocketed (again with sometimes dubious benefit to the many).
The aggregate supply of information to the average citizen had nothing to do with any of this. There has been more information at our fingertips in the past 30 years than at any point in the of history of mankind. But accessing it and sharing it does not mean understanding what it means or what to do with it.
In the recently published and highly entertaining compendium, "Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?" (edited by John Brockman), several thinkers use the image of a deluge or a flood to describe the online informationscape. George Dyson, a historian of science, suggests that the flood has forced us to turn from being hunter-gatherers of information to hunter-discarders. The problem of knowledge is not a lack but rather an excess of information. Jon Kleinberg, a professor of computer science at Cornell University, notes that interacting even with the mundane online world requires the tools of traditional scholarship, and that we need to go beyond "computer literacy" to "conveying the much more complex skill of 'information literacy' to the very young."
On this score, the egalitarian dreams of Schmidt and Google seem remote from a new economic Enlightenment or enlightenment of any sort. A study commissioned several years ago by the British Library found that the generation that grew up with their sense of information shaped by the Internet — Generation Google — didn’t really know how to search, and couldn’t really evaluate what they ended up finding. More troubling, they didn’t even know that they didn’t know how to do any of this. Solve that, Google.
