I first published this piece in Dec 1993. That was the last time my first wife and I could have described ourselves as lovers. The family gathering at Christmas that year my youngest son always calls our “Shooting Party”, after a wonderful movie with James Stewart, depicting the Edwardian culture literally falling apart in the last months before WWI changed Britain and Europe forever!
Anyway, in this piece I wrote about the rise of the “Information Age”. See for yourself how close I got with some of these concepts (many from Peter Drucker, as you will see).
I was a little bit off with “Educational Entrepreneur”; these days we would probably say Infopreneur.
Did I foresee the rise of social networking in the section of “The Human Element”? I think so 🙂
Drucker was spot on in talking about New Social Classes. He described perfectly the high wage and social status of those who live and work in Silicon Valley.
I called my writings then Applied Philosophics™. I still have the trademark for that name in the UK.
The promised knowledge and skills will be coming to you, via this website…
Knowledge As An Economic Commodity
The industrial society is dead in the Western world. Increasingly we are seeing manufacturing operations being transferred to countries where labour is cheap and plentiful. You don’t need to be an economic whizz to see that the prosperity which peaked in the eighties will never again repeat in Europe—or even the USA.
There is good and bad in this. There will be problems; there will be opportunities. To use Dickens’ phrase from the very start of A Tale Of Two Cities: “These are the best of times and the worst of times”. How bad they become depends to a great degree on whether we can ride with what is coming along.
The West has entered the “Information Age”. I am not merely referring to computerized information technology (IT) but an era in which knowledge and expertise will be a key commodity. According to leading business philosopher and doyen Peter Drucker, the basic economic resource of the future will be knowledge, rather than capital, natural resources or labour (“Post‑Capitalist Society“, P E Drucker, Butterworth‑Heinemann 1993).
He introduces the idea of a “knowledge worker” which he argues will become the elite of a new society.
He even suggests a probable hierarchy, starting with knowledge executives ‑ people who know how to put expertise to work in the way that industrialists managed monetary capital ‑ knowledge professionals and then knowledge employees.
Even the knowledge employee would enjoy a far higher status than do lowly manual, shop or office workers of today. Interestingly, this trend is already well in place. Forty years ago in the UK, people employed by virtue of their knowledge or skills were less than one third of the workforce. Today they exceed three quarters.
A 1967 study under Marc Porat, sponsored by the US Department of Commerce tried to put a numerical worth on information jobs. It concluded that, at that time, 46% of the gross national product and 53% of all income earned came from the information sector. He was at pains to include those people in information jobs but not necessarily in information‑based companies, which he called the secondary information sector.
Obviously, since 1967, this has grown by leaps and bounds.
But what seems to be happening now, that I could not foresee when I first wrote this, is that knowledge itself is being taken over by Pacific Rim countries (and beyond). Even knowledge is being outsourced.
Knowledge Productivity
The economic task facing the West, according to Drucker, is to raise the productivity of knowledge work. He cites Britain as an example of squandered wastage of this precious resource: According to its production of scientific and technical knowledge, Britain should have been the world’s economic leader in the post‑World War II era.
Antibiotics, the jet engine, the body scanner, even the computer, were all British developments! But Britain did not succeed in turning these knowledge‑achievements into successful products and services, into jobs, into exports, into market standing. The non‑productivity of its knowledge, more than anything else, is at the root of the slow and steady erosion of the British economy.
The lack of success could be described as a failure of applied intelligence.
Failure Of Existing Education
Ironically, this shift to a knowledge economy is happening against a background of declining educational achievements. As John Naisbitt remarks in his best‑selling 80s book Megatrends, “In this literacy‑ intensive society, when we need basic reading and writing skills more than ever before, the educational system is turning out a very inferior product”.
A 1980 report by the US Department of Education and the National Science Foundation stated that most Americans are moving towards “virtual scientific and technological illiteracy”. Things can hardly be any better elsewhere in the civilized world.
It was reported to the UK’s 1991‑93 National Commission on Education, organized jointly by the British Association, the Royal Society, the British Academy and the Fellowship of Engineering, that a survey of 21‑year olds revealed 15% had trouble with basic literacy and over 20% were deficient in simple mathematical skills.
The report went on to conclude that: “An uncomfortably large minority of young people leaving school have trouble with literacy and numeracy and seem to have benefited too little from their education”.
We have paid a heavy price for four decades of left‑wing namby‑pamby social and educational philosophies. It was Naisbitt who pointed out that, for the first time in many generations, we have youngsters graduating from the system who are less well educated than their parents.
The Geographical Changes In Economics
The inexorable drift of international trade towards the Pacific‑basin countries and the Indian sub-continent will continue over the next 50 years. As worldwide communications and transportation grow ever more comprehensive, there will be no geographical disadvantage to companies and industry operating remotely from their markets.
In any case, the importance of European customers will probably decline significantly. Asian markets will be worth vastly more. Economically, it makes sense to move the industrial base to areas where cheap labour is the rule.
It can hardly even be seen as immoral, when to millions of young people from emergent nations, such as Korea, China and the Philippines, wages which Western workers would reject as demeaning, represent to them a fantastic increase in standards of living.
We will be left with our sole remaining valuable asset ‑ knowledge.
For the time being at least, we have several decades start in scientific, electronic and industrial educational background. This will probably not last long, as the upsurge of Japanese technology has demonstrated; India and China will soon threaten even Japan’s hegemony. This makes it all the more vital that we husband our resource carefully for as long as possible.
The Overwhelming Tide Of Information
One of the crucial problems with the new ease of information exchange in our society is the growing volume of communications. People are starting to speak of “information pollution”. As it yearly becomes easier to draft, print and replicate data, and circulate it with ever‑increasing speed around the globe, there is a real danger of the individual becoming overwhelmed and being unable to make sense of this welter of information.
Naisbitt points out that we have for the first time an economy based on a key resource that is not only renewable, but self‑generating.
Running out of it is not a problem. Too much, too fast is the difficulty already with us. For example: between 6,000 and 7,000 thousand scientific articles are written each day – scientific and technical information now increases 13 percent per year, which means it doubles every 5.5 years”.
As Naisbitt says wryly, “We are drowning in information but starving for knowledge”.
New Social Classes
Drucker’s vision of the future is one which will radically reshape the role of the individual. It means, effectively, that a major gulf will open up between knowledge workers and the rest. Those with relatively high knowledge skills, who are well prepared for this trend in the market place, will be able to command relatively high salaries and secure jobs. The rest will be also‑rans.
As the division increases between the employed and unemployable, those who have knowledge skills and those who don’t, rich and poor ‑ which side of the rift do you want to be on? What about your children? With the question couched in these terms, it is obvious what you must do.
Make no mistake, there is wealth in knowledge. Naisbitt reckons “The new source of power is not money in the hands of the few but information in the hands of the many”. This trend makes AP’s elite and effective educational technology a real investment in the future.
What This Means For The Individual
The good news is that this works to the advantage of the prepared individual. It is well known that the transition times between economies, when most people are having a big problems, are the times when entrepreneurship flourishes. We are now in such a period.
But the big difference this time around, as Naisbitt tells us, is that, “With information as the strategic resource, access to the economic system is much easier.” In this climate of need for learning and continuously adapting to new ideas, I foresee a niche for a new kind of professional: one who might be called the Educational Entrepreneur.
Naisbitt has a suggestion: “Former teachers with an en‑trepreneurial bent will find a growing market for educational consulting services in the new information society”.
I would only add that those who know and can apply the Applied Philosophics™ study technology will be head and shoulders above teachers in the game. What is far more important than the old‑fashioned role of passing on information is the science that teaches study, learning and the nature of knowledge. I have that science under my belt.
“But”, asks Naisbitt, “Will we be able to acquire needed skills fast enough?” Not without the special kind of comprehension we teach in AP. He goes on to point out that “Technology will help us manage the information society only to the extent that its members are skilled in utilizing it”.
Application of learning skills is precisely AP’s strong suit ‑ hence the name: Applied Philosophics.
Constantly Renewable Learning
If all this emphasis on the need for study ability is not enough, there is one further reason why educational entrepreneurs will have unlimited opportunities. That is the rise of continuing education. To stay level, adults will have to commit themselves to a great deal of on‑going learning, which has not been the case in the past.
The National Commission on Education remarked in its findings that it is a “safe assumption” that people starting work today will, generally speaking, change employer—and sometimes occupation—several times in their working lives, and that this will often need to be accompanied by the need for further learning.
Even if a person stays in the same job with same employer for long periods, there is still a key trend that makes continuous study inevitable and that is the increasingly rapid obsolescence of people’s knowledge and skills and therefore the constant need to renew and reinforce them on the job.
Finally, there is the matter of personal fulfilment. For many people, what is taught at school is unsatisfying and irrelevant. There is a natural desire to study a more personal curriculum ‑ as the rise of alternative technologies, new philosophies and special‑interest literature shows clearly.
The Human Element
In the technological impersonal world, the individual tends to become lost, a “ghost in the machine”, to borrow a much used metaphor from physicist philosophers. Those who can interpret the techno-babble noise and relate the products of our mechanized in-animate world to fellow humans will be valuable, even to management, who are themselves, after all, only humans.
No matter what our computers can do for us, we must still have someone capable of understanding the output. What we don’t need is robots, who can merely regurgitate information.
Those with the power to think beyond the data and put it into effect in human terms, as opposed to yet another computer sub‑routine, will hold the key to the entire edifice of commerce. Such people will determine the quality, character and survival of business cartels and governments alike.
According to Naisbitt, “An industrial society pits man against fabricated nature. In an information society ‑ for the first time in civilization ‑ the game is people interacting with other people”.
This means there is more at issue than mere “teaching”. What is needed is a comprehensive un‑derstanding of the working of the mind and higher psyche.
The new educationalists ‑ among whom those who know AP will be, quite simply, outstanding ‑ will become the philosophers and leaders of the age; defining a new role as a kind of priest or pastoral counsellor. Hopefully, the religious analogy will not offend anyone.
What Precisely We Have To Offer
We can teach people a scientific method of study that is to ordinary education as a turbo‑charged sports car is to a beaten up old family saloon.
We know about the true nature of knowledge, learning, mind activity and how this relates to the reality we perceive. I don’t say we can turn out geniuses to order ‑though we could certainly rehabilitate some failed examples ‑ but we can without doubt make the average individual far more capable of riding, and even conquering, the data revolution than he or she would have a chance of doing otherwise.
The AP study set is your key to a prosperous and gainfully employed future. Those who know it and use it will be head and shoulders above those who don’t. Unless you are one of the few outstanding individuals who get there by flare but have no real idea what they did to succeed and can’t duplicate it or teach it to others, you will find AP invaluable.
In the past a few elite have dominated trade and been able to earn considerable personal fortunes, through access to the principal commercial catalyst ‑ money. I expect members of AP who take the time and trouble to really learn and experience the system of personal enhancement we offer to be able to enjoy considerable personal status and wealth, by controlling the new resource: educational and people skills.
Applied Philosophics™ has the needed study science. We also have the best answers yet in the field of knowledge about knowledge, perception, experience and the nature of truth. Our model for the mind and the ability to defeat what Korzybski called UN‑sanity with our techniques, could be quite crucial and should give us a special role in society. The world needs Applied Philosophics™. It may not know it yet.
We haven’t told enough people, that’s all!
Dr. Keith Scott-Mumby
For Applied Philosophics™
Copyright © 4th Dec 1993