On May 3, 2005, at 12:48 PM, Igor Rojdestvenski wrote:
> Just a quick remark regarding "smth"-based economies. In my
opinion,
> as any self-organizing system, the economy exists at the flow of
> energy and entropy. It consumes energy of the flow, so the flow
> "downstream" becomes less energetic. It "dumps"
entropy", so the flow
> downstream becomes more entropic.
>
> In the resource based economy the flow is that of the resource.
> Natural resource (oil, gas), as in Russian Federation and in the
> Middle East. Human resource flow (as in China, India). Financial (US,
> Europe, Japan). To a degree, knowledge is also flow, so to speak of
> knowledge based economy we should imagine an economy that produces and
> exports mostly knowledge. For the knowledge production to become a
> flow sufficient to sustain a self-organizing economy, initial
> financial flows and human resource flows should work in accord for
> some time. In this respect, the Western World started producing
> knowledge in sufficient amounts after it has accumulated enough
> financial resource to purchase brains from other regions. I have read
> somewhere that in the US most of the technological advances and
> inventions are made by immigrants. Therefore the country may become a
> knwoledge-based economy if it has enough money to buy good and
> educated brains and if it aims at such development.
>
> The big problem and the big danger in the knowledge based economy is
> that, unlike other resources, knowledge has much less inertia. The
> conversion from oil to other energy sources will happen eventually,
> but it will take dozens of years. The principal industrial processes
> (steel production, energy production, shipbuilding, etc) also change
> but at quite a slow pace. On the other hands, knowledge paradigms may
> change virtually overnight, as to change them there is no need in
> moving "material" things, applying force and using energy. That
is why
> knowledge-based society may cease to be one virtually overnight,
> missing the "right" turn at the development path. The dotcom
crisis of
> recent is a good example.
I think that Igor has made a good point here. Knowledge-based
economies represent a higher order form of economy, in the same sense
that a tornado is a higher order system form than are convection cells
for the dissipation of thermal gradients in our atmosphere. These
higher order forms have faster dynamics, burn through their fuels
faster, and are vulnerable to faster dissipation of their own form. If
there is sufficient fuel available on a reliable basis, then emergent
higher order systems can persist and dominate the lower order systems
upon which they were built. In the case of knowledge-based economies,
they are undoubtedly build upon a foundation of resource-based
economies, and they would surely collapse before their foundational
resource-based economies in globally bad times. Nobody would be
interested in paying for information if it takes all the money they
have to acquire basic resources (like say food).
Cheers,
Guy Hoelzer
Department of Biology
University of Nevada Reno
Reno, NV 89557
Phone: 775-784-4860
Fax: 775-784-1302
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Received on Wed May 4 18:04:15 2005
