Information economy

There are nine definitions of information and another nine for knowledge in my Webster's Dictionary. Both can mean pretty much whatever someone wants them to mean. That's why we defined more than 400 terms in our work on knowledge services. But these relate to the nature of the stuff that is being traded. I think that this discourse is on a higher plane.

There are identifiable economic sectors, national economies, and a global economy. To me, the "information economy" and "knowledge economy" represent economic sectors that trade intellectual property within national and global economies. They both underpin the service sector of a national economy. Although I don't know how big something has to be to be considered an economic sector, both, in my opinion, are big enough to be so classed. I agree that both are subsets of the broader "Information Society." This, then considers the first of your valid defitional arguments.

Information is a "final valued product" that is traded through "provider/user (seller/buyer) transactions. A lot of people are making a lot of money by trading intellectual property in the form of information (just ask Google), so it is worthy of continued inclusion as an identifiable economic sector, along with agricultural produce, industrial products, and services. However, I personally feel that "information economy" is a transitional term that will gradually be subsumed within the "knowledge economy."

The magnitude of the knowledge sector of the US economy was first described by Machlup (1962), and the nature of knowledge work were first described by Drucker (1974). Although information (meaning within a context) is a lower-order form of IP than knowledge (understanding that enables prediction), that is not the main reason why the two are different from an economic perspective. Knowledge is the only commodity that has increasing returns of scale and, more importantly, begets more of itself; information cannot do this. Our work on knowledge services (regrettably deleted from Wikipedia as too avant-guarde) shows that knowledge is processed and used through a nine-step value chain and that knowledge markets are circular in nature. (see: [[1]]) It is the fundamentally different form of knowledge markets as well as their growing size that warrants their separate inclusion.

Many related terms (digital economy, Internet economy, network economy) refer to the nature of the infrastructure that underlies a national economy. They are also subsets of the informatiom and knowledge economies. I, for one, would support merging all these terms under economic infrastructures (which I confirmed does not exist, at the cost of loosing my original, unsaved comments)

You also considered the notion of economic traisitions, of which we are currently in the midst. No one knows what the new economic order will look like in a few decades, but I am confident that it will incorporate elements of everything that has been discussed here. However, economic transitions may be an appropriate term (for which I have no intention of searching!). Beyond that probably belongs in an "encyclopedia of speculation" and not wanting to be deleted again, I'll stop here.Albert Simard 21:21, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

Information economy is a loosely defined term to characterize an economy with increased role of informational activities and information industry.

The vagueness of the term has two major sources. First, not surprisingly, there is no agreed-upon definition regarding the threshold of when an economy is information economy and when it is not. This is partly due to the fact that research has been focused on various "increase" in informational activities, rather than the level it has achieved. It is rare to see research seriously discussing whether a certain level of informatization in an economy is enough to label it as information economy.

Second, there are many different kinds of measurements of information-related economic indicators that are used by researchers. Contrastingly to the first problem, the second problem is not the lack of attention, but the lack of agreement among various opinions.

Two related questions regarding the term are also noteworthy. First, there is some argument, most notably by Manuel Castells, that information economy is not mutually exclusive with manufacturing economy. He finds that some countries such as Germany and Japan exhibit the informatization of manufacturing processes. In a typical conceptualization, however, information economy is considered a "stage" or "phase" of an economy, coming after stages of hunting, agriculture, and manufacturing. This conceptualization can be widely observed regarding information society, a closely related but wider concept.

Second, there are numerous characterization of the transformations some of the contemporary economies are going through. Service economy, high-tech economy, late-capitalism, post-fordism, and global economy are among the most frequently used terms, having some overlaps and contradictions among themselves. The more closer terms to information economy would include knowledge economy and post-industrial economy.

One can also contend that the term "information" is not a clearly defined concept when applied to economic and social matters.

One's choice of conceptualizing the contemporary economy is also related to the expectations and policy and political imperatives that one has.

References

(Additional Reading)

Boyett, Joseph H. And Jimmie T. Boyett. 2001. The Guru Guide to the Knowledge Economy. John Wiley& Sons. John Wiley & Sons

Cozel, Diane. 1997. The Weightless World. MIT Press. Evans, Philip B. and Thomas S. Wurster. 2000. Blown to Bits. Harvard Business School Press.

Mcgee, James and Lawrence Prusak. 1993. Managing Information Strategically. Random House

Negroponte, Nicholas. 1996. Being Digital.

Rayport, Jeffrey F. and John J. Sviokla. 1995. Exploiting the Virtual Value Chain. in: Harvard Business Review (no. 1995)

Rifkin, Jeremy. 2000. The Age of Access. Penguin Putnam.

Schwartz, Evan I. 1999. Digital Darwinism. Broadway Books.

Shapiro, Carl and Hal R. Varian. 1999. Harvard Business School Press.

Tapscott, Donald. 1996. The Digital Economy. McGraw-Hill.

See also

References