Ideological evolution : the competitiveness of nations in a global knowledge-based economy

Abstract

My objective is to deepen and thicken public and private policy debate about the competitiveness of nations in a global knowledge–based economy. To do so I first demonstrate the inadequacies of the Standard Model of economics, the last ideology standing after the Market-Marx Wars. Second, I develop a methodology (Trans-Disciplinary Induction) to acquire ‘knowledge about knowledge’. In the process of surveying the event horizons of seventeen sub-disciplines of thought, I redefine ‘ideology’ as the search for commensurable sets or systems of ideas shared across knowledge domains and practices. Third, I create a definitional avalanche about knowledge as a noun, verb, form and content in etymology, psychology, epistemology & pedagogy, law and economics. In the process I demonstrate that personal & tacit and codified & tooled knowledge are the staple commodities of the global knowledge-based economy. Fourth, I establish the origins and nature of the Nation-State, the shifting sands of sovereignty on which it stands and the complimentary roles it plays as curator, facilitator, patron, architect and engineer of the national knowledge-base. Fifth, I examine the competitiveness of nations with respect to a production function in which all inputs, outputs and coefficients are defined in terms of knowledge. In the process, I demonstrated that competitiveness, as Darwinian win/lose against rivals, is inadequate because it does not account for the mutualism of symbionts and environmental change, i.e., coevolution and coconstruction. Accordingly, I propose ‘fitness’ as a more appropriate criterion for the competitiveness of nations in a global knowledge-based economy. Finally, I consider the comparative advantage of nations given their initial and differing national knowledge endowments.