As I mentioned in a previous
post, world is drastically shifting to a modern knowledge economy from a
traditional industrial economy in which the basic principle of economics remains
intact. I pointed out then that be it industrial economy or knowledge economy,
the underlying driving force of these economies is the selfishness of human
being which appears in a contrary shapes depending upon the context. When it
comes to industrial economy, people satisfy their selfishness by restricting
others from sharing their assets like land, industry or gold whereas under
knowledge economy, people satisfy their selfishness by sharing their asset - knowledge-
with others. That is, what matters ultimately is the selfishness of the human
being which is originally an outcome of their
realization and comprehension of the complex reality that they can’t eat
gold they have accumulated or they can’t
swallow the vast stretches of land they have acquired or they can’t chew large
piles of currency they have shelved and therefore, they were eventually developing
a mental capacity to translate this physical inability to their mental satisfaction by making use of
accumulated assets to satisfy their selfishness. That is why people are vying
with each other to accumulate their wealth. The more the wealth they have, the
richest they will be not in their eyes because their stomach did not actually expand
with the expansion of their wealth, instead they are richest in the eyes of others (non rich) not in the sense that with
the increase in their (riches’) wealth others (non riches’) stomach will be
expanding, instead others (non riches’) stomach will be contracting which
otherwise implies that the stomach of the richest will ideally be expanding
implying that richest attains a distinguished status in the society about which they are
proud of and it is this proud that fuels them to carry forward their endeavor
to become further rich and thereby much more distinguished. I am sure that at
least few may disagree with me in this endeavor to analyze the relevance
economics just based on the size of the belly of the people. Of course, they
may appear to be sensible to another few who are opulent and since they are
opulent their concern would go beyond stomach to Rolex, Ferrari, Johnny Walker
etc whereas for a majority here still what matters is the expansion and
contraction of their stomach. Given this, I think it is still sensible to
evaluate the economics today based on the size of the stomach and the capacity
to manage it.
What we have seen above
is the obvious dissimilarity between industrial and knowledge economies in the
form of restraining others from acquiring what rich has like land in the
industrial economy while sharing with others what rich posses in the form of
knowledge in the knowledge economy and also we have seen how this dissimilarity
can be traced back to the original ethos of economics - selfishness. However, a
deep look into the structure of past industrial economy and modern knowledge
economy will also reveal an interesting similarity between them in the form of private
property rights. As private property rights were used in the past during industrial
economy and even today to restrict others from enjoying the benefit of your
wealth, today in this knowledge economy too, a variant of the same property
rights namely intellectual property rights (IPR) such as patents or copy rights
are used to restrict others from enjoying the benefit of the asset you posses
in the form of knowledge. Of course,
here we cannot argue that entire benefit is restricted to others in this
knowledge era through IPR. Instead, here we have to make a distinction between
past wealth and present wealth. In the past, wealth in the form of land, gold
etc had only economic appeal or component compared to the modern asset - knowledge,
apart from its economic appeal or component; knowledge has got an intrinsic appeal
of enlightenment or intrinsic component of information. Therefore, while the
modern owners of the knowledge restrict others from enjoying the economic
component of their knowledge through IPR as did in the past, they share the appeal
of enlightenment with others through, for instance, blogs or Youtube or books.
Again as I pointed out,
this kind of division of what should be shared and what should not be shared is
dictated by the selfishness of the human being. That is, in the case of
knowledge, those who possess knowledge today come forward to share its power to
enlighten people as a part of their selfishness that they can boast of the fact
that others got empowered through his/her knowledge which will increase his/her
image as a knowledgeable person attracting recognition from others. At the same,
others are restricted to get empowered economically though his/her knowledge as
he/she is aware of the fact it will ultimately boomerang on himself/herself as
others will be economically empowered in due course of time if he/she share the
economic component of their knowledge with others leading to his/her selfishness
getting hurt as he/she would be, at best, one among many equals while his/her
selfishness is so eager to put him/her on the top of the list as, for example,
the richest person of the world. Thus, in no way, the modern knowledge economy
undermines the traditional principles on which the discipline of modern
economics is built, despite certain superfluous camouflage.
It is here the
practical long term global significance of the Joseph E Stiglitz’s view on the Intellectual
property rights like patents, copy rights should be understood as he has
sounded alarm regarding the detrimental effect of current system of patenting
on the developing and poor countries in his book making Globalisation Work. His argument for a fare patenting regime
was similar to what I have demonstrated here. Stiglitz argued the current
regime of patenting dominated by rich countries should be reformed in such a
way that it will help the poor or developing countries to benefit from
spill-over effect of knowledge so that they will be empowered to innovate on their own as knowledge , innovation and technical progress
are the result of a virtuous cycle of sharing and collaboration of the past
wisdom with present across the spectrum and at the same time, the economic
interests of the innovators in rich countries should be protected without
getting their economic incentives for further innovation trampled upon. Stiglitz
observed that IPR have both cost in the form of incentives for monopolization
and benefit in the form of incentive for innovation and therefore, a
well-designed IPR requires balancing the costs and benefits. This is what
exactly I have described above. The economic component of modern knowledge
should be protected to safeguard the economic incentives of the innovator; at
the same time the enlightenment component of
the modern knowledge or innovation must be shared between all so that those who
are at the bottom of the innovation like developing countries can be empowered
to move up to the top. Therefore, finally, we will wind up this discussion reflecting on
the importance of the democratization of the global politics which shapes the
rules of the game at the global level so that a ‘give and take’ approach of
collaboration can be carved out for a better world tomorrow because in the
absence of a true democratic rules of the game at the global level, it is
impossible to bring this kind of a structural change in the global politico and
economic regime to the complete disregard of the plight of the helpless majority
of the world. 
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