The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
2nd Draft March 2005
Index
[A]
Derivation of knowledge in the tetraktys is captured in a short poem by Apatow:
The Monad is the Father Embracing all that will be.
The Dyad, the form of Difference, and
Mother of Multiplicity.
The Triad, the first actual number,
With Beginning, End, and Mean,
The Tetrad completes the arrangement
Of the Soul and what is seen.
(Apatow 1999)
[A] In response to creation of
the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) among the market economies in
1947, the
[B]
This bulwark is about to be tested because the so-called ‘peace clause’
exempting agricultural subsidies from WTO jurisdiction lapsed on
[C]
Of Bentham,
Schumpeter credits Bentham
with “having created something that was new in literature... namely, the
shallowest of all conceivable philosophies of life that stands indeed in a
position of irreconcilable antagonism to the rest of them.” (Schumpeter
1954:132-4).
Even more damming, John Maynard Keynes observed: “I do now regard that as the worm which has
been gnawing at the insides of modern civilization and is responsible for its
present moral decay. We used to regard
the Christians as the enemy, because they appeared as the representatives of
tradition, convention and hocus-pocus.
In truth, it was the Benthamite calculus,
based on an over-valuation of the economic criterion, which was destroying the
quality of the popular Ideal. Moreover,
it was this escape from Bentham, ... which has served to protect the whole lot of us from
the final reductio ad absurdum of Benthamism
known as Marxism.” (Keynes 1949, 96-7)
[D] According to Freeman: “Circular causality
expresses the interrelations between levels in a hierarchy: a top-down
macroscopic state simultaneously influences microscopic particles that
bottom-up create and sustain the macroscopic state. The state exists over a span of inner time in
the system that can be collapsed to a point in external time. Events in real time are marked by changes in
the state of the system, which are discrete.” (Freeman, 1999)
[E] Accepting the strict assumptions of the Standard
Model results in an outcome known as ‘perfect competition’ in which no consumer
or producer exercises market power, all costs are internalized in market price
and all benefits are captured by the consumer.
It is ironic that under these strict assumptions there is no role for
the State in the economy, i.e., the
same outcome as under perfect communism with its Marxian withering away of the
State.
[F] Of industrial districts,
[G] Quoting
[A] “Economists have therefore to cope with two intrinsic
difficulties of system analysis - the definition of system boundaries and the
specification of system structure. On
the one hand, all economic systems are sub-systems - sub-systems both of larger
economic systems (unless one is explicitly dealing with the world economy) and
also of more broadly defined human and ecological systems; thus
interdependencies transcend the bounds of [the system being studied.]” (Loasby 1971, 863)
[B] “Symbols
gather round the thing to be explained, understood, interpreted. The act of becoming conscious consists in the
concentric grouping of symbols around the object, all circumscribing and
describing the unknown from many sides.
Each symbol lays bare another essential side of the object to be
grasped, points to another facet of meaning.
Only the canon of these symbols congregating about the center in question,
the coherent symbol group, can lead to an understanding of what the symbols
point to and of what they are trying to express” (Neumann
1954, 7).
[C] Loasby catches the dilemma in writing of organizational behaviour: “This is not an area in which the economist has any special skill; but it is work which comes naturally to psychologists, sociologists and organization theorists. Unfortunately, psychologists, sociologists and organization theorists agree rather less often than economists, so that the economist who wishes to use their ideas is faced with the problem of choosing between them” (Loasby 1967, 172-173).
[A] “The ultimate repositories of technological knowledge in any society are the men comprising it... In itself a firm possesses no knowledge. That which is available to it belongs to the men associated with it. Its production function is really built up in exactly the same way, and from the same basic ingredients, as society’s.” (Graf 1957)
[B] “One longs, indeed, for a unit of knowledge, which perhaps might be called a “wit,” analogous to the “bit” as used in information theory; but up to now at any rate no such practical unit has emerged. It is certainly tempting to think of knowledge as a capital stock of information, knowledge being to information what capital is to income, and to use the bit itself in the form of a stock as the measure of knowledge. Certainly the improbability of a structure, which is what the bit really measures, is highly related to the knowledge concept. The bit, however, abstracts completely from the content of either information or knowledge, and while it is enormously useful for telephone engineers, who have no interest in what is being said over their telephones, for purposes of the social system theorist we need a measure which takes account of significance and which would weight, for instance, the gossip of a teenager rather low and the communications over the hot line between Moscow and Washington rather high. Up to now we seem to have no way of doing this, short of a kind of qualitative guesswork, though even this will be better than nothing.” (Boulding 1966, 2-3)
[C] “… all through an organism's existence, from birth to death, it passes through a series of genetically programmed changes. Plainly language growth is simply one of these predetermined changes. Language depends upon a genetic endowment that's on a par with the ones that specify the structure of our visual or circulatory systems, or determine we have arms instead of wings. (Chomsky, 1983, 116)
Take for example, the aesthetic
sense. We like and understand Beethoven
because we are humans with a particular, genetically determined mental
constitution. The same thing is as true
for art as it is for science. The fact
that we can understand and appreciate certain kinds of art has a flip
side. There must be all kinds of domains
of artistic achievement that are beyond our mind's capacities to
understand. Much of the new work in art
and science since (the late nineteenth century) is meaningless to the ordinary
person.
Take modern music - post-Schonbergian music.
Many artists say if you don't understand modern music it's because you
haven't listened enough. But modern
music wouldn't be accessible to me if I listened to it forever. Modern music is accessible to professionals and
may be to people with a special bent but it's not accessible to the ordinary
person who doesn't have a particular quirk of mind that enables him to grasp
modern music let alone make him want to deal with it.” (Chomsky, 1983, 172)
[D] “Nothing is
more characteristic and symptomatic in this respect than the gulf that has
opened out between faith and knowledge:
The contrast has become so enormous that one is obliged to speak of the
incommensurability of these two categories and their way of looking at the
world. And yet they are concerned with
the same empirical world in which we live, for even the theologians tell us
that faith is supported by facts that became historically perceptible in this
known world of ours - namely that Christ was born as a real human being, worked
many miracles and suffered his fate, died under Pontius Pilate, and rose up in
the flesh after his death. Theology
rejects any tendency to take the assertions of its earliest records as written
myths and, accordingly, to understand them symbolically. Indeed, it is the theologians themselves who
have recently made the attempt - no doubt as a concession to “knowledge” - to
“demythologize” the object of their faith while drawing the line quite
arbitrarily at the crucial points. But
to the critical intellect it is only too obvious that myth is an integral
component of all religions and therefore cannot be excluded from the assertions
of faith without injuring them.” (Jung [1918] 1970, 285)
[E] “It used to be that scientists learned about what
their colleagues did by reading journals.
Actually they used to read books, then things
moved so fast they read only papers, then even faster so they read only letters
to the editor in their rapid publication journals. Now they are moving so fast
that they do not read but telephone each other, and meet at society meetings
and conferences, preferably in beautiful hotels in elegant towns around the
world. They get by in what are now
called “invisible colleges” of little groups of peers. They are small societies of everybody who is
anybody in each little particular speciality. These groups are very efficient for their
purpose and, somewhere along the line, people eventually write [their findings
and thoughts] up.” (Price, D. de S. 1963)
[F] “THERE is an island in the ocean where in 1914 a
few Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Germans lived.
No cable reaches that island, and the British mail steamer comes but
once in sixty days. In September it had
not yet come, and the islanders were still talking about the latest newspaper
which told about the approaching trial of Madame Caillaux
for the shooting of Gaston Calmette. It was, therefore, with more than usual
eagerness that the whole colony assembled at the quay on a day in mid-September
to hear from the captain what the verdict had been. They learned that for over six weeks now
those of them who were English and those of them who were French had been
fighting in behalf of the sanctity of treaties against those of them who were
Germans. For six strange weeks they had
acted as if they were friends, when in fact they were enemies.” (Lippman 1922, 1)
[G] “Although he
(Mauryama) seems no longer to favour the term, he
defined paradigmatology as the “science of structures
of reasoning” whether between disciplines, professions, cultures or
individuals. He notes that the “problem
of communication between different structures of reasoning had not been raised
until recently”, since scholars tended either to advocate their own approach or
describe that of others. Contributing to
this neglect is the fact that the choice between logics is based on factors
which are beyond and independent of any logic.”
Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential
http://www.uia.org/strategies/stratcom_bodies.php?kap=53
[H]
“Putting it this way, we become aware of the
incommensurability of the two things combined in a technical performance. Suppose you hammer in a nail. Before starting, you look at the hammer, the
nail and the board into which you will drive it; the result is knowledge which
you can put into words. Then you hammer
in the nail. The result is a deed:
something is now firmly nailed on. Of
this you can have knowledge, but it is not itself knowledge. It is a material change which counts as an
achievement. Knowledge can be true or
false, while action can only be successful or unsuccessful, right or wrong.
It follows that an observing which prepares a
contriving must seek knowledge that is not merely true, but also useful as a
guide to a practical performance. It
must strive for applicable knowledge.
The conceptual framework of applicable knowledge is
different from that of pure knowledge.
It is determined primarily in terms of the successful performances to
which such knowledge is relevant. Take
hammering again. This performance
implies the conception of a hammer, which defines a class of objects that are (actual
or potential) hammers. It will include,
apart from the usual tools of this kind, rifle butts, shoe heels and fat
dictionaries, and establish at the same time a grading of these tools according
to suitability. The suitability of an
object to serve as a hammer is an observable property, but it can be observed
only within the framework defined by the performance it is supposed to serve.” (M. Polanyi, 1962a, 174-75)
[I] “In the progress of the division of labour, the
employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour, that is, of the
great body of the people, comes to be confined to a few very simple operations;
frequently to one or two. But the
understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their
ordinary employments. The man whose
whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the
effects, too, are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no
occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention, in finding
out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of
such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible
for a human creature to become. The
torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a
part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or
tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many
even of the ordinary duties of private life. Of the great and extensive interests of his
country he is altogether incapable of judging; and unless very particular pains
have been taken to render him otherwise, he is equally incapable of defending
his country in war. The uniformity of
his stationary life naturally corrupts the courage of his mind, and makes him
regard, with abhorrence, the irregular, uncertain, and adventurous life of a
soldier. It corrupts even the activity
of his body, and renders him incapable of exerting his strength with vigour and perseverance in any other employment, than that
to which he has been bred. His dexterity
at his own particular trade seems, in this manner, to be acquired at the
expense of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues. But in every improved and civilized society,
this is the state into which the labouring poor, that
is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government
takes some pains to prevent it.”
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations,
PART. II. Of
the Expense of the Institution for the Education of Youth. 1776.
[A] “There is a similar relationship between the
things we make and a complex of human capacities that include skills, know-how,
the ability to visualize, and, indeed, beliefs, the nexus often referred to as
“tacit knowledge.” (Baird 2004, 129)
[B] “But, in our twentieth century, we still have
slaves who do most of the work. These
now are those mechanical devices. Our
native hands (organisms) are comparatively inactive while the mechanized
extension does the job, for example, carving a turkey with an electrified knife
or embroidering with a sewing machine.
Thus is the agent now being subtly induced into assuming an
aristocratic, stand-offish relation to the work being done by automated things
around him. Or,
if that is too strong, the agent is at least being deprived of actions of his
native arms and legs that used to express and articulate him - actions in which
he would come alive. Automation is
taking the place of some of these, and there is a caution to be issued about
this. A kind of aristocratic superiority
to doing homely, expressive things with the native hand is growing, or becoming
simply a boredom, and the result is a shriveling of the native organism as a
whole, in favor of automata that crowd it out.
The psychology of this is complex and must be anxiously watched.” (Aldrich 1969, 383)
[C]
Arguably, this emotional distancing from the object of investigation called
scientific objectivity reflects a mélange of Platonic universalism, Stoic
acceptance of life the way it is and the otherworldliness of Christianity that
characterizes much of the western ethos.
[D]
“The term ‘design’ covers the mutual employment of the material and the
propositional, as well as hybrid forms such as drawings, computer simulations,
and material models. However, design
must be understood to embrace material knowledge as well as ideational
knowledge. The “design paradigm” is the
most promising recent development in the epistemology of technology, but it
must not lose track of this central insight about design. Thought and design are not restricted to processes
conducted in language.” (Baird 2004, 149)
[E] Today there are pattern recognition journals in
computer science, engineering, mathematics and psychology. Examples include: the International
Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence (IJPRAI); the Journal of the Pattern Recognition Society (PR); Pattern Recognition Letters (PRL); Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis (PRIA); and, Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine
Intelligence (PAMI).
[F]
“Thus my thesis is that the major problem at present confronting us in scientific
methodology, leaving aside creativity, namely how we choose between various
hypotheses and data and come up with an “improved” scientific edifice, is just
another aspect of a fundamental human capability, that of pattern recognition
and processing. Indeed I would go
further and maintain that, since pattern processing is so characteristic a
human activity, then if the logic of scientific
discovery is something different from it, we need to find an explanation for
this difference.” (Sparkes 1972, 36)
[G] “Rule preference is of an essentially aesthetic
nature. Symmetry, simplicity,
straightforwardness, analogy, and other formal features contribute to
distinguish a good rule from a bad one.
The clarity of a rule is, however, not a number that can simply be
attached to it or springs from a calculation of the clarity values of its
components. Just like beauty “is not in
any of the parts or members of a pillar, but results from the whole,” the
beauty or attractiveness of a rule depends on its overall pattern, and how well
it fits in with other rules in the prevailing set of customs.” (Schlicht 2000, 40)
[H] “Design is clearly distinct from philosophy,
including natural philosophy. It is, as
both Aristotle and modern engineers have held, an attribute of a human being
which may be expressed in an object but which is not identical with the object
itself. At the outset, design is an
adaptation of means to some preconceived end.
This I take to be the central purpose of technology… Design involves a
structure or pattern, a particular combination of details or component parts,
and it is precisely the gestalt or pattern that is of the essence for the
designer.” (Layton 1974, 37)
[I] “The dramatic new evidence that altered completely
the nature of cosmology did so, not by any intellectual prowess on Galileo’s
part, but by revealing new evidence, the existence of which had never been
suspected. The telescope was not devised
to seek such evidence, and it was not used primarily to gain more. Its purpose was to inject each new telescope
owner into this world of what can only be called “artificial revelation”. The term is not used lightly. Galileo was not so conceited as to think that
he was brighter than all previous authorities; he knew that he had been
presented with decisive new evidence of the structure of nature.” (Price 1984, 9)
[J] I am, however, supported in my choice of terms, by
a number of scholars including Erich Jantsch (1967;
1975). From working on technological forecasting and assessment in the 1960s he
moved on to ‘systems philosophy’ in the 1970s in an attempt to integrate
understanding of human knowledge from astrophysics to table manners. His unifying concept is captured in the title
of his 1975 book Design for Evolution:
Self-Organization and Planning in the Life of Human Systems. In this use, the term ‘design’ captures the
organic, mutable and fuzzy nature of this realm of knowing.
[K] “Just how special that community must be if
science is to survive and grow may be indicated by the very tenuousness of
humanity’s hold on the scientific enterprise. Every civilization of which we have records
has possessed a technology, an art, a religion, a political system, laws, and
so on. In many cases those facets of
civilization have been as developed as our own. But only the civilizations that descend from
Hellenic Greece have possessed more than the most rudimentary science. The bulk of scientific knowledge is a product
of
[L] “I do recognize, however, that there is something
unique in any evolved scientific attitude, which is neither philosophic nor
aesthetic but only itself, and it is precisely this sense of uniqueness that we
also find in the psychological attitude which animates the heuristic method of
our present study. It may be that this
method will reveal not only the existence of a psychological attitude but that
of a scientific attitude of which the psychological is a part. But certainly, because of their so very
recent appearance in history, we cannot claim for science or psychology the
same epistemological authenticity that we can demonstrate in the four basic
cultural attitudes as they originated and grew out of history into their
contemporary forms.” (Henderson 1984, 77)
[M]
Of
[N] Using its opposable thumb, humanity reached out to shape the material world to compensate for its elemental frailty – no great size, no claws or talons and tiny canine teeth. To eat and survive predation, the human brain reached out with finger-thumb coordination to grasp and shape parts of the world into tools with which to then manipulate other parts, e.g., to kill game or plant seeds. It appears, from the fossil record, that the opposable thumb preceded, and in a path-dependent manner contributed to, the subsequent and extraordinarily rapid evolutionary growth and development of the human brain itself.
[A] “But, more than having become merely another overly vague bit of fashionable economic jargon, ‘tacit knowledge’ now is an increasingly ‘loaded’ buzzword, freighted with both methodological implications for micro-economic theory in general, and policy significance for the economics of science and technology, innovation, and economic growth. Indeed, references to ‘tacitness’ have become a platform used by some economists to launch fresh attacks upon national policies of public subsidization for R&D activities, and equally by other economists to construct novel rationales for governmental funding of science and engineering research and training programs.” (Cowan, David & Foray 2000, 212-213)
[B]
“The dramatic new evidence that altered
completely the nature of cosmology did so, not by any intellectual prowess on
Galileo’s part, but by revealing new evidence, the existence of which had never
been suspected. The telescope was not
devised to seek such evidence, and it was not used primarily to gain more. Its purpose was to inject each new telescope
owner into this world of what can only be called “artificial revelation”. The term is not used lightly. Galileo was not so conceited as to think that
he was brighter than all previous authorities; he knew that he had been
presented with decisive new evidence of the structure of nature.” (Price 1984, 9)
[C] “Such is the
power of instrumentalities, old and new, that they are probably also the chief
agent for the sociological and substantive disaggregation
of the chief scientific and technological disciplines into their constituent subdisciplines and invisible colleges. Scientists and engineers seem to be bound
together in their invisible colleges, not so much by any communality of their
paradigms, ways of thought, and cognitive training, as by a guild-like
communality of the tools and instrumentalities that they use in their work.” (Price 1984,
15)
[D] “It
appears also that instrumentation requirements sometimes serve as a powerful
device for bringing together research scientists from separate
disciplines. X-ray crystallography
played such a role in the development of molecular biology, precisely because
it is, in effect, an instrument-embodied technique.” (Rosenberg 1994,
156)
[E] “Think,
for example, of the physical knowledge embodied in a thermometer. To contest that knowledge would be to fight
on many fronts against many institutionalized activities that depend upon
treating the thermometer as a “black box.”
Intercalating science or technology into larger and larger networks of
action is what makes them durable. When
all the elements in a network act together to protect an item of knowledge,
then that knowledge is strong and we come to call it scientific. The central modern scientific phenomenon to
which attention is directed is thus metrology - the development of standards
and their circulation around the world.” (Shapin 1995, 306-307)
[F] “Take for example the identification of a thing as a
tool. It implies that a useful purpose
can be achieved by handling the thing as an instrument for that purpose. I cannot identify the thing as a tool if I do
not know what it is for - or if knowing its supposed purpose, I believe it to
be useless for that purpose.” (Polanyi 1962a, 56)
[G] “The polis is the place of art... The magus,
the. poet who, like Orpheus and Arion is also a supreme sage, can make stones of music. One version of the myth has it that the walls
of Thebes were built by songs, the poet's voice and harmonious learning
summoning brute matter into stately civic forum. The implicit metaphors are far reaching: the
“numbers” of music and of poetry are cognate with the proportionate use and
division of matter and space; the poem and the built city are exemplars both of
the outward, living shapes of reason.
And only in the city can the poet, the dramatist, the architect find an
audience sufficiently compact, sufficiently informed to yield him adequate
echo. Etymology preserves this link
between “public”, in the sense of the literary or theatrical public and the
“republic” meaning the assembly in the space and governance of the city.” (Steiner,
1976)
[H] “… the
fact that the soldier could [now] choose any bayonet and still fit it on to the
muzzle of his gun - even though the two pieces of metal had been manufactured
several hundred kilometres apart - testifies to the
fact that technical knowledge had been taken out of the domain of private and
local knowledge, and moved up to a more general level of organization… It is no
accident that these mass interchangeable bayonets proved eminently suitable for
the mass army fielded by the French régime during the Revolutionary wars.” (Alder 1998, 536)
[I] “A central point for Babbage is that an extensive division of
labor is itself an essential prerequisite to technical change. This is so for two related reasons. First of all, technical improvements are not
generally dependent upon a few rarely gifted individuals, although the more
“beautiful combinations” are indeed the work of the occasional genius (p.
260). Rather, and secondly, inventive
activity needs to be seen as a consequence as well as a cause of the division
of labor. This is so because “The arts
of contriving, of drawing, and of executing, do not usually reside in their
greatest perfection in one individual; and in this, as in other arts, the division
of labor must be applied” (p. 266; emphasis Babbage’s). (Rosenberg 1994,
32)
[J] “Before 1854, British gunmaking
was concentrated in a large but complicated structure of handicraft firms,
mainly located in Birmingham, and producing firearms to individual order or in
very small batches. American gunmakers were at this time engaged in mass production of
both civilian and military weapons.
These weapons had interchangeable parts, a fact which the British found
to be almost unbelievable. This
production required a number of machines which were virtually unknown in
[K]
“Nineteenth-century English observers frequently noted that American products
were designed to accommodate the needs of the machine rather than the
user. Lloyd, for example, noted of the
American cutlery trade that “where mechanical devices cannot be adjusted to the
production of the traditional product, the product must be modified to the
demands of the machine. Hence, the
standard American table-knife is a rigid, metal shape, handle and blade forged
in one piece, the whole being finished by electroplating - an implement
eminently suited to factory production.” (Ames & Rosenberg 1968, 36)
[L] “Today,
artifacts travel with increasing ease over much of the globe. Transformers adapt personal computers to
local currents; bicycle parts are sized in metric dimensions (even in the
[M] Current ISO Categories
01 Generalities. Terminology. Standardization. Documentation
03 Sociology. Services. Company organization and management. Administration. Transport
07 Mathematics. Natural Sciences
11 Health care technology
13 Environment. Health protection. Safety
17 Metrology and measurement. Physical phenomena
19 Testing Analytical chemistry, see 71.040
21 Mechanical systems and components for general use
23 Fluid systems and components for general use
Measurement of fluid flow, see 17.120
25 Manufacturing engineering
27 Energy and heat transfer engineering
29 Electrical engineering
31 Electronics
33 Telecommunications. Audio and video engineering
35 Information technology. Office machines
37 Image technology
39 Precision mechanics. Jewellery
43 Road vehicles engineering
45 Railway engineering
47 Shipbuilding and marine structures
49 Aircraft and space vehicle engineering
53 Materials handling equipment
55 Packaging and distribution of goods
59 Textile and leather technology
61 Clothing industry
65 Agriculture
67 Food technology
71 Chemical technology
73 Mining and minerals
75 Petroleum and related technologies
77 Metallurgy
79 Wood technology
81 Glass and ceramics industries
83 Rubber and plastic industries
85 Paper technology
87 Paint and colour industries
91 Construction materials and building
93 Civil engineering
95 Military engineering
97 Domestic and commercial equipment. Entertainment. Sports
International Standards Organization
List of ISO Fields,
[N] The economic term ‘tied-good’ requires explanation. An example is the old 'punch card' computer. The computer could not operate without such cards which, technically, were an output of the pulp, paper and publishing industries, sequentially. The computer and cards were tied-goods in production of computational results. Similarly, there can only be a market for audio-visual software, e.g. records and tapes if there is a market for home entertainment hardware, e.g. cameras, record players, TV sets, etc. They are tied-goods in consumption fitting hand in glove. In this regard, it is likely, but not proved, that the home entertainment center (HEC) is the third most expensive consumer durable purchased by the average consumer after house and car. Similarly, private collections of audio-visual software including phonographs, photographs and video tapes constitute an enormous stock of American cultural wealth. (Chartrand 2000, 24)
[O] “At the
beginning of this study, Cambrosio undertook a
comparison of several different experimental protocols for the production of hybridomas. He had
not yet been able to attend a fusion experiment but relied, to a great extent,
on his previous biological training.
While one might expect that it would be relatively easy to determine
variations between the protocols, this was true only in a “mechanical” or
literal sense; to the untrained eye, the protocols appeared to be arbitrary
lists of instructions lacking any overall sense. The situation changed fundamentally when he
was able to attend a training session in the technique. Once these instructions were embodied in a
series of gestures, they became confounded with other factors such as the
manual skills of a given person or that person’s degree of familiarity with a
piece of equipment. The comparison
between protocols now became possible, each line of instruction evoking shapes,
colors, time spans, and gestures that could be compared.” (Cambrosio & Keating
1988, 249)
[P] “It appears also that instrumentation requirements sometimes serve as
a powerful device for bringing together research scientists from separate
disciplines. X-ray crystallography
played such a role in the development of molecular biology, precisely because
it is, in effect, an instrument-embodied technique. In a very different way the increasing
reliance on supercomputers is serving to bring members of different disciplines
together. The impetus in this case is,
to a considerable degree, the high cost of the technology and, consequently,
the small number of locations where users need to convene.” (Rosenberg 1994,
156)
[Q] In Zen-like terms of a monk transcending technique (Suzuki 1959), Polanyi notes:
“Our subsidiary awareness of tools and probes can be
regarded now as the act of making them form a part of our own body. The way we use a hammer or a blind man uses
his stick, shows in fact that in both cases we shift outwards the points at
which we make contact with the things that we observe as objects outside
ourselves. While we rely on a tool or a
probe, these are not handled as external objects. We may test the tool for its effectiveness or
the probe for its suitability, e.g. in discovering the hidden details of a
cavity, but the tool and the probe can never lie in the field of these
operations; they remain necessarily on our side of it, forming part of
ourselves, the operating persons. We
pour ourselves out into them and assimilate them as parts of our own existence.
We accept them existentially by dwelling in them.” (Polanyi 1962a, 59)
[R] “… not only in after-dinner speeches, which are not
necessarily to be taken seriously, but also in framing membership criteria for
the professional grades of engineering societies, a matter which engineers take
with deadly seriousness. The
professional engineer is usually considered the creative practitioner, the
“real” engineer. In the definition of
such a person, the “ability to design” has been almost universally acknowledged
as the crucial test, though in practice only the most professionally oriented
societies have actually adopted it. It
is interesting to note that “ability to design” and “reasoned state of capacity
to make” are very similar, both in form and in
substance.” (Layton 1974, 37)
[S] Referencing
Herbert Simon,
[T] “… a
machine can be smashed and the laws of physics and chemistry will go on
operating unfailingly in the parts remaining after the machine ceases to
exist. Engineering principles create the
structure of the machine which harnesses the laws of physics and chemistry for
the purposes the machine is designed to serve.
Physics and chemistry cannot reveal the practical principles of design
or co-ordination which are the structure of the machine…Consequently, and the
consequences reach far beyond the example at hand, the meaning of the higher
level cannot be accounted for by reductive analysis of the elements forming the
lower levels. No one can derive a
machine from the laws of physics and chemistry…
At each consecutive level there is a state which can be said to be less
tangible than the one below it.” (Polanyi 1970)
[U] “Design
is clearly distinct from philosophy, including natural philosophy. It is, as both Aristotle and modern engineers
have held, an attribute of a human being which may be expressed in an object
but which is not identical with the object itself. At the outset, design is an adaptation of
means to some preconceived end. This I
take to be the central purpose of technology… Design involves a structure or
pattern, a particular combination of details or component parts, and it is
precisely the gestalt or pattern that is of the essence for the designer.” (Layton 1974, 37)
[V] “Indeed,
it is the oldest part of engineering knowledge to be recorded; the early
engineering and machine books are in the nature of portfolios of design, and
there is a deep kinship between engineering design and art, running back to the
artist-engineers of the Renaissance and earlier. The natural units of study of engineering
design resemble the iconographic themes of the art historian.” (Layton 1976, 698)
[W] “… only… science is already
injected in documentary form in a way that mirrors the content of the
science. The similar mirroring process
in technology gives rise to the artifacts and processes, and it is necessary to
transform this evidence into written form through the medium of descriptions
which savor of the antiquarian.” (Price 1965,
565-566)
[X] “One essential aspect of this expansion in use has
been modification of design so that instruments can be employed by people with
lower levels of training. Often, in
fact, it has proven worthwhile to redesign to lower performance ceilings
in order to permit the substitution of automatic control for control by a
highly trained operator.” (Rosenberg 1994,
257-258)
[Y] “Black-boxed
instruments also hide their thing-y-ness.
This is one of the ironies that confronts thing
knowledge. Instruments, when they are
working, connect seamlessly with theory; they provide information, data that
can be enfolded into the propositional life of theory. This is why epistemology has been able to
carry on under the illusion of knowledge solely as a play of ideas. The materiality of instruments only surfaces
in their making and breaking. One needs
to appreciate this essentially Heideggerian point to
recognize that and to see how material knowledge complements knowledge borne by
ideas.” (Baird 2004, 146)
[Z] “Reverse engineering is fundamentally directed to
discovery and learning. Engineers learn
the state of the art not just by reading printed publications, going to
technical conferences, and working on projects for their firms, but also by
reverse engineering others’ products.
Learning what has been done before often leads to new products and
advances in know-how. Reverse
engineering may be a slower and more expensive way for information to percolate
through a technical community than patenting or publication, but it is
nonetheless an effective source of information.
Of necessity, reverse engineering is a form of dependent creation, but
this does not taint it, for in truth, all innovators, as the saying goes,
“stand on the shoulders of giants” as well as on the shoulder of other
incremental innovators. Progress in
science and the useful arts is advanced by dissemination of know-how, whether
by publication, patenting or reverse engineering.” (Samuelson & Scotchmer 2002, 70-71).
[AA] “A technology claiming acceptance
irrespective of economic considerations is meaningless. Indeed, any invention can be rendered
worthless and altogether farcical by a radical change in the values of the
means used up and the ends produced by it.
If the price of all fuels went up a hundredfold, all steam engines, gas
turbines, motor cars, and aeroplanes would have to be
thrown on the junk heap. Strictly
speaking, a technical process is valid, therefore, only within the valuations
prevailing at one particular moment and at one particular time… By contrast, no
part of science can lose its validity by a change in the current relative value
of things. (Polanyi 1960-61,
404)
[BB] The tacit dimension of money and financial
capital in general, is captured by Adam Smith:
“every prudent man in every period of society, after the first
establishment of the division of labour, must naturally have endeavoured to manage his affairs is such a manner, as to
have at all times by him, besides the peculiar produce of his own industry, a
certain quantity of some one commodity or other, such as he imagined few people would be likely to refuse in exchange
for the produce of their industry.” (quoted in Dooley 2003, 9-10)
[HHC: emphasis added]
[CC] “Social capital refers to the values and beliefs
that citizens share in their everyday dealings and which give meaning and
provide design for all sorts of rules. The
use of the word capital implies that we are dealing with an asset. The word social tells us that it is an asset
attained through membership of a community. Social capital is accumulated within the
community through processes of interaction and learning. But social capital is not a commodity for
which trade is technically possible or even meaningful.” (Maskell
2001, 2)
[DD] “The market, in Smith’s total scheme, operated
within and gave effect to the rest of the institutional system as well as to
individual choice within the system.
Voluntary exchange takes places only within legal and moral rules as
well as the market. The market,
according to Smith, must be comprehended within the larger system involved in
the continuing resolution of the problem of order, however much it may
contribute thereto. The order produced
by markets can only arise if the legal and moral framework is operating well;
as Rosenberg has written, the “decisive superiority” of the price system “as a
way of organizing economic life lay in the fact that, when it was surrounded by
appropriate institutions, it tied the dynamic and powerful motive force of
self-interest to the general welfare.”
The market does not do so alone.” (Samuels 1977,
197)
[EE] “It concerns the relation between designing,
making, and building, under the head of technology. In the present sophisticated stage of
development of our society, there is a division of labor here. He who designs does not usually build or
make, and the makers and the builders are the skilled laborers who do not
themselves design what they make or build.
The architect designs the building, the carpenters, plumbers,
electricians, and bricklayers build it.
Thus the total operation is a performing art with blueprints for score
or choreography, the difference being that in this technological case neither
the co-ordinated performances (ballet) of the skilled
workers nor the finished product is put on exhibit simply to be looked at,
contemplated. It is a useful performing
art. Its value is instrumental.” (Aldrich 1969,
381-382)
[FF] “Take for example the identification of a thing
as a tool. It implies that a useful
purpose can be achieved by handling the thing as an instrument for that
purpose. I cannot identify the thing as
a tool if I do not know what it is for - or if knowing its supposed purpose, I
believe it to be useless for that purpose.” (Polanyi 1962a, 56)
[GG] “But, in all this, what is not ‘objective’? As soon as we realize that observation is
affected essentially by the observer, we have to incorporate that observer into
the phenomena to be observed, and make him an object too. This fact has transformed the physical
sciences, and of course the social sciences are based entirely on the sense of
the need to observe the community of observers.
That leaves us with nothing genuinely “subjective” except a structure of
language, including as said mathematical language, which is the only thing left
that can be distinguished from the objective world. Even that structure is objective to each
student of it. People are “subjects,”
then, not as people, but only to the extent that they form a community within a
linguistic structure which records some observation of the objective. In this context the word “subject”
incorporates its other meaning of what is treated by language, as when we speak
of the subject of a book.” (Frye 1981, 21-22)
[HH] This is the negative side to a ‘narrowcast’
economy. The concept of a ‘cultured
person’ in the European tradition is one who is well ‘rounded’. The cultured European is one who is
interested in, and knowledgeable about literature, painting, cuisine, dance,
and theatre, not just about work. The
[II] “We have paid a terrible price for our education,
such as it is. The Magian
World View, in so far as it exists, has taken flight into science, and only the
great scientists have it or understand where it leads; the lesser ones are
merely clockmakers of a larger growth, just as so many of our humanist scholars
are just cud-chewers or system grinders. We have educated ourselves into a world from
which wonder, and the fear and dread and splendour
and freedom of wonder have been banished. Of course, wonder is costly. You couldn't incorporate it into a modern
state because it is the antithesis of the anxiously worshipped security which
is what a modern state is asked to give. Wonder is marvellous,
but it is also cruel, cruel, cruel. It is
undemocratic, discriminatory, and pitiless.” (Davies 1987, 836)
[JJ] “In terms
of our education, the entire establishment has been built on the assumptions of
the left hemisphere and of visual space.
This establishment does little to help the transition to the electronic
phase of simultaneous or acoustic man.
Our educational procedures are still oriented towards preparing people
to cope with specific industrial products and distribution of same. Electronic man, on the other hand, is in need
of training in… empathy and intuition.
Logic is replaced by analogy, and communications are being superseded by
pattern recognition.” (McLuhan, 1978)
[KK] “Increasingly,
performance in these new knowledge-based industries will come to depend on
running the institution so as to attract, hold, and motivate knowledge workers.
When this can no longer be done by
satisfying knowledge workers’ greed, as we are now trying to do, it will have
to be done by satisfying their values, and by giving them social recognition
and social power. It will have to be
done by turning them from subordinates into fellow executives, and from
employees, however well paid, into partners.”
(Drucker 1998, 57)
[LL]
“Such intrinsic motivation is, as a rule, less perspicuous and less tangible
than clearly discernible external rewards.
As a consequence, it can be destroyed if such a reward is offered. The effect has been referred to as ‘the
hidden costs of reward’ and by the saying ‘extrinsic motivation destroys intrinsic
motivation’.” (Schlicht, 1998, 125)
[MM] “Custom is, thus, an amalgam comprising habitual, emotional, and cognitive elements, which cannot easily be separated. There is a strong interplay between habits, emotions, convictions, and deliberation. Each supports the other, and influences go back and forth.” (Schlicht, 1998, 12-13)
[A] “Mr. James Ward, in Encycl.
Brit. XX. 49 s.v. Psychology,
assigns to the word two main meanings: ‘To know may mean either to
perceive or apprehend, or it may mean to understand or comprehend... Thus a blind man, who cannot know
about light in the first sense, may know about light in the second, if
he studies a treatise on optics.’ Others
hold that the primary and only proper object of knowing is a fact or facts (as
in our sense 10), and that all so-called knowing of things or persons resolves
itself, upon analysis, into the knowing of certain facts about these, as their
existence, identity, nature, attributes, etc., the particular fact being
understood from the context, or by a consideration of the kind of fact which is
usually wanted to be known about the thing or person in question. Thus, ‘Do you know Mr. G.?’, ‘Do you know
[B] “The conceptual framework of applicable knowledge
is different from that of pure knowledge.
It is determined primarily in terms of the successful performances to
which such knowledge is relevant. Take
hammering again. This performance
implies the conception of a hammer, which defines a class of objects that are
(actual or potential) hammers. It will
include, apart from the usual tools of this kind, rifle butts, shoe heels and
fat dictionaries, and establish at the same time a grading of these tools
according to suitability. The
suitability of an object to serve as a hammer is an observable property, but it
can be observed only within the framework defined by the performance it is
supposed to serve.” (Polanyi 1962a, 175)
[C] “At the
beginning of this study, Cambrosio undertook a comparison
of several different experimental protocols for the production of hybridomas. He had
not yet been able to attend a fusion experiment but relied, to a great extent,
on his previous biological training.
While one might expect that it would be relatively easy to determine
variations between the protocols, this was true only in a “mechanical” or
literal sense; to the untrained eye, the protocols appeared to be arbitrary
lists of instructions lacking any overall sense. The situation changed fundamentally when he
was able to attend a training session in the technique. Once these instructions were embodied in a
series of gestures, they became confounded with other factors such as the
manual skills of a given person or that person’s degree of familiarity with a
piece of equipment. The comparison
between protocols now became possible, each line of instruction evoking shapes,
colors, time spans, and gestures that could be compared.” (Cambrosio & Keating 1988,
249)
[D] Coined by Rudy Rucker with his 1988 science
fiction novel Wetware, the term has
been adopted by ‘hacker culture’ as well as education and economics. In economics, Paul Romer
uses the term in his 1995 article “Beyond the Knowledge Worker”:
Wetware captures what economists call human capital
and what philosophers and cognitive scientists sometimes call tacit knowledge.
It includes all the things stored in the ‘wet’ computer of a person’s human
brain. (Romer 1995)
As I will subsequently argue, Romer
confuses distinct forms of knowledge including personal & tacit with ‘human
capital’ as well as human-readable (codified knowledge) and machine readable
(soft-tooled knowledge). With respect to
education, in his 1995 testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives Joint
Hearing on Educational Technology in the 21st Century, Professor Chris Dede of
For example, “visualization” is an emerging type of
rhetoric that enhances learning by using the human visual system to find
patterns in large amounts of information. People have very powerful pattern recognition
capabilities for images; much of our brain is “wetware” dedicated to this
purpose. As a result, when tabular data
of numerical variables such as temperature, pressure, and velocity are
transfigured into graphical objects whose shifts in shape, texture, size,
color, and motion convey the changing values of each variable, increased
insights are often attained. For
example, graphical data visualizations that model thunderstorm-related
phenomena (e.g., downbursts, air flows, cloud movements) are valuable in
helping meteorologists and students understand the dynamics of these weather
systems. (Dede 1995)
[E] “In this final chapter, I wish to turn to science
itself and point out that it too, and even my entire essay, can be read as a
response to the breakdown of the bicameral mind. For what is the nature of this blessing of
certainty that science so devoutly demands in its very Jacob-like wrestling
with nature? Why should we demand that
the universe make itself clear to us?
Why do we care?... It is something about
understanding the totality of existence, the essential defining reality of
things, the entire universe and man’s place in it… It is a direction whose far
beginning in the mists of history can be distantly seen in the search for lost
directives in the breakdown of the bicameral mind… It is a search that is
obvious in the omen literature of
We sometimes think, and even like to
think, that the two greatest exertions that have influenced mankind, religion
and science, have always been historical enemies, intriguing us in opposite
directions. But this effort at special
identity is loudly false. It is not
religion but the church and science that were hostile to each other. And it was rivalry, not contravention. Both were religious. They were two giants fuming at each other
over the same ground. Both proclaimed to
be the only way to divine revelation.” (Jaynes 1976, 433-44)
[F]
This conclusion is consonant with Jaynes’ ‘bicameral
mind’ but not dependent upon it. It is
also consonant with the continuing Western ‘cult of the genius’. (Woodmansee 1984, 446, 47ff [Zilsel 1918])
Western ‘ego dominance’ can meaningfully be contrasted with Eastern
thought through the I Ching
or The Book of
Changes. (Wilhelm, 1950) to which Jung wrote an introduction. All human relationships are played out in
eight possible roles – father and mother as well as first, second and third
born son and daughter. Each role entails
distinct entitlements and obligations. (Schlict
1998) These roles are vertically
extended up the social hierarchy, i.e.,
the Emperor plays the role of father to whom others act appropriately as first,
second or third son or daughter. Out of
these eight roles, sixty-four possible patterns of human entanglement are
defined as lined hexagrams. Social space
and human situation is defined and one can know one’s place. This codified patterning of human
relationships was built up over thousands of years beginning as early as 2700
B.C.E. with the tortoise shell oracle.
And the I Ching
was one of very few ‘ancient’ books to survive the great book burning of 213
B.C.E. by the First Emperor of China - Ch’in Shih
Huang Ti (who built the Great Wall) who believed: Before Me, No History!
[G]
In a CBS interview with the former President he was asked: “The central
question, if I may, and I know this is difficult, the central question is
why?”
[H] In discussing Foucault’s concern about the effect
of instrumental perception, Idhe notes:
“In short, perception becomes weighted in favor of vision, is virtually
reduced to vision; but more, it also selects that which, within the visible, is
to count, a reduction of vision. This is
so much the case that the metaphysics of primary and secondary qualities even
enters into what can count within vision.
“The area of visibility in which observation is able to assume its
powers is thus only what is left after these exclusions: a visibility freed
from all other sensory burdens and restricted, moreover, to black and white.” Finally, this vision is structured according
to geometrical values with emphasis upon lines, surfaces, forms, and reliefs.” (Idhe 1991,41)
[I] With respect to analytic psychology, Jung
observed:
“Experience shows that it is practically impossible,
owing to adverse circumstances in general, for anyone to develop all his
psychological functions simultaneously. The
demands of society compel a man to apply himself first and foremost to the
differentiation of the function with which he is best equipped by nature, or
which will secure him the greatest social success. Very frequently, indeed as a general rule, a
man identifies more or less completely with the most favoured
and hence the most developed function. It
is this that gives rise to the various psychological types.” Quoted in Sharp 1991,
‘Primary Function’.
With respect to computers, the technical term is master/slave
rather than dominant/subordinate. Some
Black American commentators have objected to the term for obvious reasons. The terminology may also reflect, however,
Aldrich’s concern that the classical
contempt towards technology continues today but with the mechanical device cast
in the role of slave. (Aldrich 1969, 383)
[J] “Nature is
given to man ready-made; we may try to elucidate it, but we cannot improve
it. But language, literature, history,
politics, law, and religion, as well as economic and social life, are
constantly on the move, and they are advanced by poets, playwrights, novelists,
politicians, preachers, journalists, and all kinds of other, non-scholarly,
writers. These are the primary
initiators of cultural changes, rather than the Faculties of Arts which
contribute to the advancement of culture mainly at second-hand, by studying
language, literature, history, law, religion, and so on, as produced outside
the universities. Hence, academic
science has an advantage over the humanities similar to that it holds over
technology…
We may conclude that the profound
distinction between science and technology is but an instance of the difference
between the study of nature on the one hand and the study of human activities
and the products of human activities, on the other. The universities cannot be the main source of
progress either in humanistic or in material culture, as they are in the
natural sciences.” (Polanyi 1960-61,
406)
[K] “It is probable that research-front technology is
strongly related only to that part of scientific knowledge that has been packed
down as part of ambient learning and education, not to research-front science…
Similarly, research-front science is related only to the ambient technological knowledge
of the previous generation of students, not to the research front of the
technological state of the art and its innovations… This reciprocal relation
between science and technology, involving the research front of one and the
accrued archive of the other, is nevertheless sufficient to keep the two in
phase in their separate growths within each otherwise independent cumulation.” (Price 1965, 568)
[L]
“He acknowledged that his own work was simply “a collection of original engineering statistics with the general laws deduced from them.” But he insisted that “science is nothing but a similar collection of statistics.” Isherwood similarly imputed to science a strongly utilitarian cast. To him sound theory consisted of “the whole of the knowledge we possess on any subject, put in such order and form that we can make a reliable practical application of it.” While Isherwood was proposing to limit drastically the idea of science and general law in one direction, he was expanding it in another. The general laws which he had deduced from his statistical tables were not statements about nature at all but rather rules for the design of a man-made object. In short, Isherwood incorporated engineering principles into the laws of science. (Layton 1976, 692-693)
[M] There is a distinct Islamic copyright tradition based
on Islamic law - the Shar'ia. The following
summary is based on private correspondence between the author and Mustafa Salman Habib, Ph.D,
Barrister at Law (
Early Islamic jurists recognized copyright and offered
protection from pirates. Unlike written legal codes of today, traditional
Islamic copyright treated copyright infringement as a breach of ethics, i.e. a
moral rather than a criminal act. Punishment took the form of defamation
of the infringer and casting shame on his tribe. An exception was blasphemy or incitement
against Islam. The infamous case of Salman Rushdi is an example of what an author can expect if
convicted of writing such a work. Only in recent years have formal
copyright statutes been drafted, e.g.
in
[N] “Although economists have written on topics of
intellectual property for a long time, the impact of economics on public policy
in this area has been slight, especially as compared to the influence of
professional writings in areas such as antitrust and taxation. We believe that too few of the profession’s
resources have been devoted to these issues and that, of those resources that
have been employed, too few have been devoted to empirical analyses.” (Besen & Raskind 1991, 4)
[O] “Mr.
Justice Yates had very clear and definite notions as to the limits of property,
but a reference which he makes to the civil law throws a stronger light on his
view of the whole subject than any of his direct reasoning. What the Institutes have to say relating to
“wild animals,” he observes, “is very applicable to this case.” And he then
proceeds to draw a comparison between these two singularly related
subjects. Animals
ferae naturae
are yours “while they continue in your possession, but no longer. “ So those
wild and volatile objects which we call ideas are yours as long as they are
properly kenneled in the mind. Once
unchain or publish them, and they “become incapable of being any longer a
subject of property; all mankind are equally entitled to read them; and every
reader becomes as fully possessed of all the ideas as the author himself ever
was.” (Sedgwick 1879)
[P] “From the 14th century to the early 18th century
in Europe, the issuance of letters patent’ and granting of royal privileges’
conferring monopoly rights in exchange for the disclosure of technological
information was aimed primarily at effecting the transfer and application of
existing industrial arts and engineering practices, i.e., techniques already known to master-craftsmen and engineers in
other territories; and not at inducing fresh inventive activity. Many early patent monopolies were, in effect,
local franchises designed to shelter immigrating expert-practitioners from the
subsequent competition of the apprentices and journeymen they were expected to
train, or others who would try imitate them once their particular ‘mysterie’ had been successfully established in the new
cities and principalities to which they were recruited.” (David 2001, 7, ft.
7)
[Q] “The body of knowledge that is called ‘science’
consists of an immense pool to which small annual increments are made at the ‘frontier.’ The true significance of science is
diminished, rather than enhanced, by extreme emphasis on the importance of the
most recent “increment” to that pool.” (Rosenberg 1994,
143)
[R] “Although the concept of a distinct sphere
demarcated as the “public domain” is well recognized under conventional
intellectual property laws, what it contains is not defined and legal “rights”
to its use are not delineated; “property” is what is defined by the law, and
the public domain holds the residuum.” (David 2000, 15)
[S] “In the fourteenth century, such grants were
employed to encourage the introduction of foreign technologies through the
emigration of skilled artisans from abroad, as in the case of the letters
patent given to the Flemish weaver, John Kempe, by
Edward II in 1331, or the protection granted to two Brabant weavers to settle
at York in 1336, or the similar grant conferred in 1368 upon three clock-makers
from Delft.
[T] “Queen Mary incorporated the Stationers’ Company “to
set up a mode of regulating the English printing trade that would facilitate
the efforts of the Romish clergy to stamp out the
Protestant Reformation.” But the motives
of the stationers “were of a less exalted kind.” Thus, Elizabeth, relying on the stationers’
self-interest, confirmed the Charter to turn the stationers to support the
English, rather than the Romish church, and the
Stationers’ Company became, in turn, the instrument of the Stuarts against the
Puritans, in the early seventeenth century; the instrument of the Puritans,
against their royalist enemies, when the Puritans came to power; the instrument
of the royalists against the Puritans, after the Restoration; and, for a brief
time, the instrument of the triumphant Whigs, after “the glorious Revolution”
of 1687.5. But through all these
vicissitudes, the stationers themselves steadfastly remained, what they had
always been, eminently practical men; and they consistently protected their
monopoly.” (Patterson 1993)
[U] Under Cromwell, the Licensing Act of the Long
Parliament (1640-1660) affirmed the rights of individual publishers to their
copies and forbade other publishers to “counterfeit” works of other publishers.
This was necessary because Parliament
had done away with the King’s Star Chamber, under whose provisions the
copyright system had developed.
[V] “One of the earliest writers to agitate against
the booksellers’ perpetual monopolies was John Locke. In 1693, the Licensing Act, [10] the
instrument through which the Stationers’ Company was empowered to regulate the
trade, faced renewal. Concerned
particularly with the guild’s monopolies in Latin writers, Locke wrote to his
friend, Edward Clarke, a Member of Parliament, urging him to speak in
Parliament for the interests of the educated public at large:.. One year later, when the Licensing Act was again being considered, Locke drafted a formal Memorandum for Clarke in which he
repeated his objection to the guild’s monopolies in the Latin classics and
argued that copyrights in contemporary authors should also be limited in term.”
(M. Rose 2004, 78)
[W] That the Statute of Queen Anne, the first modern
copyright act, was primarily a trade regulation bill is supported by the three facts:
“First, a part deleted from the original draft of the
1710 statute clearly emphasized that authors were to be given priority over
others with respect to copyright.
Parliamentary records reveal that this particular part was removed under
pressure from monopolistic booksellers…
Second, there is the similarity between
the Statute of Monopoly of 1623 and the 1710 statute. The Statute of Monopoly
was, needless to say, intended to abolish the monopolies so rampant during the
Elizabethan age. It allowed 21-year
monopolies for existing privileges granted without specific terms and 14-year
monopolies for forthcoming inventions.
The structure of the statute is similar to the first section of the 1710
statute…
Third, there are the claims made by
intellectuals around 1710. The Licensing
Act of 1662, which gave legal authority to the monopoly in the book trade, was
repealed in 1695. John Locke contributed
much towards its repeal, writing to peers in the House of Lords and strongly
condemning the restrictions on science caused by the provisions of the Act and
the monopolies of Stationers Company.” (Shirata 2000)
[X] “The court of King's Bench, the highest court of
the common law, divided on the question, the majority supporting Lord
Mansfield, who went to the furthest possible extreme in his identification of
the right of exclusive copying and selling the copies of one's manuscript with
the right of exclusive holding and selling physical things and their products…
copyright … like the ownership of physical objects, the perpetual property of
the author, his heirs and assigns forever.
This outcome
[Y] “The most significant point about Donaldson is
that it was a compromise, i.e., a political, decision. The Lords, by holding that the common law was
the source of the author's copyright prior to publication, appeared to give the
author a victory. But the common-law
copyright, being only the right of first publication, was no copyright at all
since it did not entail the exclusive right of continued publication. The common-law copyright concept, however, proved
to be very useful to those claiming that the natural law was the source of the
statutory copyright. Their argument was
that the common-law copyright, clearly a product of natural law, was the source
of the statutory copyright and therefore that the statutory copyright was
merely the securing of a natural-law right.
Thus, the harm of the Donaldson ruling was that it laid the groundwork
for the future enhancement of the copyright monopoly on the basis of the natural-law-property
theory. In a sense, the booksellers,
while losing the battle, won the war for their successors.” (Patterson 1993)
[Z] “The most compelling advantage of encouraging
copyright industries to work out the details of the copyright law among
themselves, before passing the finished product on to a compliant Congress for
enactment, has been that it produced copyright laws that the relevant players
could live with, because they wrote them.
If we intend the law to apply to individual end users’ everyday
interaction with copyrighted material, however, we will need to take a
different approach. Direct negotiation
among industry representatives and a few hundred million end-users would be
unwieldy (even by copyright legislation standards). Imposing the choices of the current
stakeholders on a few hundred million individuals is unlikely to result in
rules that the new majority of relevant players find workable. They will not, after all, have written them. There are, moreover, few signs that the
entities proposing statutory revision have taken the public’s interests very
seriously. Instead, they seem determined
to see their proposals enacted before they can be the subject of serious public
debate.” (Litman1996).
[AA] The expression ‘a measure of our economic ignorance’ describing technological change was used in my first year economics course by Professor Harvey Lithwick at Carleton University in Ottawa in 1968.
[BB] JSTOR Economics keyword search April 2003. The related term ‘embodied technical change’ first appears in 1964 (Nelson 1964). The first reference to ‘disembodied technological change’ also appears in 1964 (Fei and Ranis 1964) while ‘disembodied technical change’ appears somewhat earlier in 1962 (Colm, Cornwall & Smithies May 1962; Solow June 1962).
[CC] “Implicitly, it modeled technology as designs for
machines. This line of work lost its
momentum, perhaps because of the difficulty people had in reconciling what is
known about machine design with an initial cut that makes technology a public
good… Recent generations of neoclassical growth theorists have not followed up
… and have contented themselves with a force
locomotif explanation: ‘Technological change
causes economic growth.’” (Romer
1996, 204).
[DD] JSTOR Economics keyword search April 2003. The term ‘exogenous technological change first appears in 1970 (Starrett 1970). However, the related term ‘exogenous technical change’ appears in 1952 (Hanson 1952).
[EE] JSTOR Economics keyword search April 2003. The term ‘endogenous technological change first appears in 1966 (Lucas 1966) as does the term ‘endogenous technical change’ (Shell 1966).
[FF] “Development, of course, covers a range of activities whose content differs widely from one industry to another. It generally includes the designing of new products, testing and evaluating their performance (which in some industries may involve the building and testing of prototypes, or experimentation with pilot plants), and inventing and designing new and appropriate manufacturing processes. In each of these activities, the role of minor modifications and small improvements that better integrate design and production, establish closer feedbacks from users to suppliers, and more effectively “tune” existing production methods, are critically important. Individually, each of these modifications and improvements will bring about some slight reduction in cost or improvement in performance. Their cumulative effects may, however, be immense.” (Rosenberg & Steinmueller 1988, 230)
[GG] “New growth theorists now start by dividing the world into two fundamentally different types of productive inputs that can be called “ideas” and “things.” Ideas are nonrival goods that could be stored in a bit string. Things are rival goods with mass (or energy). With ideas and things, one can explain how economic growth works. Nonrival ideas can be used to rearrange things, for example, when one follows a recipe and transforms noxious olives into tasty and healthful olive oil. Economic growth arises from the discovery of new recipes and the transformation of things from low to high value configurations.” (Romer 1996, 204)
[HH] Technically, the short-run is that time period in which at least one factor is fixed. Increases in other factors leads to eventually diminishing marginal returns to such increases in inputs.
[A] The Merriam
Webster Collegiate Dictionary also defines ‘nation’ as a non-Jewish
nationality based on the Biblical reference in Psalms 2:1- why do the nations
conspire. This catches another dimension
of nation as a ‘chosen people’, i.e.,
chosen by God without regard to ethnic origin, tradition or language. Thus Abraham sealed a covenant with God
naming the Jewish nation “God’s Chosen”.
With Jesus, Christians believed the covenant was transferred forming
medieval ‘Christendom’, or, the nation of Christ. Then with Mohammed, the covenant was believed
transferred for the last time to the ‘nation of Islam’. Hence, Mohammed is called ‘the seal of the
Prophets’. The openness of these monotheistic
religions to converts paved the way for the multicultural nation-states of
today such as the
[B] OED, nation-state,
n: 1918 J. A. R. Marriott European Commonw. ii. 18.
[C] OED, nation-state,
n: 1895 Polit. Sci. Q. 10
294.
[D] Arguably,
“Between 1948 and 1986,
[E] More formally, a nation state is like a biological
life form in that:
a)
it is organized like a cell separated one from the
other and from an external environment by semi-permeable osmotic borders of
exchange, trade and sometimes ‘violent’ acquisition of resources from other
nations (war);
b)
it is fueled by an internal metabolism involving
conscription, taxes and spending on its own part as well as the revenues and
expenditures of its constituent institutions and citizens;
c)
it exhibits homeostasis, i.e. it strives to maintain internal conditions separate from the
outside environment;
d)
it grows purposively by converting environmental
materials into itself, refining and upgrading its institutions and citizens and
in reacting to and selecting external stimuli;
f)
it reproduces, traditionally, by transferring
institutions and citizens to ‘colonies’ and maintains its internal structures
through the reproduction and education of its citizens and the acquisition of
immigrants; and,
g)
it evolves, unless disturbed by external forces,
towards ever more complicated structures and forms. Thus, “the longer a society has been able to
enjoy stability the more numerous will be the number of special interest groups
it sustains. Revolutions, foreign
invasions and dictatorships, and so on, are inimical to the slow and difficult
growth of special interest organizations.”
(Beckerman 1983, 916-917)
[F] “Over the
last two decades, straightforward advertising has given way to branding --
giving products and services an emotional dimension with which people can
identify. In this way,
[G] “In the
history of myths of national origins few have been as influential and have had
such a curious development as those popularized by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his
History of the Kings of Britain. His
writings, appearing about 1138... had a marked
influence in subduing the social animosities of the Bretons, Anglo-Saxons, and
Normans and drawing them together into a single nation. Geoffrey's fanciful account was used by early
Plantagenet monarchs to support their regal claims and for both Tudors and
Stuarts it came to constitute a useful prop to their dynastic ones. Though confidence in its historical
reliability had almost evaporated by the eighteenth century, as the chief
source of the Arthurian legend its influence carried on ... as a spur to Celtic
imagination... into our own day.” (MacDougall 1982: 7)
[H] “At one
time only a handful of countries were capable of developing and producing the
most sophisticated forms of military hardware; but as demonstrated recently and
dramatically by Iraq that number has now increased substantially. Drawing on assistance from friendly
governments, the services of foreign scientists and corporations, and,
increasingly, their own domestic resources, a lengthening list of states has
acquired the capability to manufacture everything from tanks to fighter
aircraft to ballistic missiles. The
number of nations able to assemble weapons of mass destruction (whether
nuclear, chemical, or biological) has also been increasing, as has the ability
of even less developed countries to provide themselves with secure channels of
communication (through the use, among other things, of fiber optic cables and
commercially available encryption devices) and advanced intelligence (through
access to satellites, whether nationally or privately launched). (Freidberg 1991, 270)
[I] “The second level of Polanyi’s argument centers on the role of the state in the
economy. Even though the economy is supposed to be
self-regulating, the state must play the ongoing role of adjusting the supply
of money and credit to avoid the twin dangers of inflation and deflation. Similarly, the state has to manage shifting
demand for employees by providing relief in periods of unemployment, by
educating and training future workers, and by seeking to influence migration
flows. In the case of land, governments
have sought to maintain continuity in food production by a variety of devices
that insulate farmers from the pressures of fluctuating harvests and volatile
prices. In urban areas, governments
manage the use of the existing land through both environmental and land use
regulations. In short, the role of
managing fictitious commodities places the state inside three of the most
important markets; it becomes utterly impossible to sustain market liberalism’s
view that the state is “outside” of the economy.” (Block 2000,
9-10)
[J] “But the more fundamental point that we learn from
Polanyi is that market Liberalism makes demands on ordinary people that are
simply not sustainable. Workers,
farmers, and small business people will not tolerate for any length of time a
pattern of economic organization in which they are subject to periodic,
dramatic fluctuations in their daily economic circumstances. In short, the neoliberal
utopia of a borderless and peaceful globe requires that millions of ordinary
people throughout the world have the flexibility to tolerate - perhaps as often
as every five or ten years - a prolonged spell in which they must survive on
half or less of what they earned before.
Polanyi believes that to expect that kind of flexibility is both morally
wrong arid deeply unrealistic. To him it
is inevitable that people will mobilize to protect themselves from these
economic shocks.” (Block 2000, 19)
[K] “It can be
personified as the action of two organising
principles in society... The one was the principle of economic liberalism,
aiming at the establishment of a self-regulating market... using largely laissez-faire
and free trade as its methods; the other was the principle of social
protection aiming at the conservation of man and nature... using protective
legislation, restrictive associations, and other instruments of intervention as
its methods.” (Polanyi quoted in Munck 2002, 17)
[L] “By a
fiction, or, as some would say, by an abstraction, it is claimed that the
General Will, which in reality emanates from the persons invested with
political power, emanates from a collective being, the Nation, of which the
rulers are nothing more than the instruments; and the rulers are always anxious
to drive this idea into the heads of their peoples. They well understand its usefulness to them
in making their power or their tyranny acceptable.” (de Jouvenal
1949, pp. 8-9)
[M] “In an interview on NBC’s Exposé in
September 1991, Pierre Marion, a former Director of the French intelligence
service, stated that: “It would not be normal that we do spy on the (United)
States in political matters; we are really allied. But in the economic competition, in the
technological competition, we are competitors; we are not allied.” (quoted in Whitney & Gainsford
1996, S627)
[N] “In defense policy, the 1990s information-edge
thesis appeared in different guises. Concepts such as information superiority,
dominant battlespace knowledge, and decision
superiority emerged as key elements of joint doctrine. National security strategy discussions focused
on national information highways and critical infrastructure protection — key
components of sustaining information-edge capabilities. In the most significant
intelligence organizational reform of the decade, the National Imagery and
Mapping Agency (NIMA) was founded with the mission of “guaranteeing the
information edge.” By the end of the
decade, the Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency, and other
national security agencies presented strategic plans aiming to sustain and
expand
[O] Concerning a European Union report by Duncan
Campbell, the Times reporter notes several alleged examples including: “… information
learned through Echelon had been given to Boeing and the old McDonnell Douglas
when they were trying to win a $6 billion contract from
[A] “Definition
of the “production function”: the technical relationship telling the amount
of output capable of being produced by each and every set of specific inputs
(or factors of production). It is
defined by a given state of technical knowledge. (Samuelson 1961, 570)
[B] “Within the university ... you can study without
waiting for any efficient or immediate result. You may search, just for the
sake of searching, and try for the sake of trying. So there is a possibility of what I would
call playing. It’s perhaps the only
place within society where play is possible to such an extent.” Jacques Derrida
(b. 1930),
[C] “In the
1980s a management book that revived Sun-tzu’s
thought and employed the revitalized figures of several ancient martial heroes
to instruct companies in the basics of business and marketing became a
bestseller in the draconian Communist environment of the People’s Republic of
China and eventually in capitalist Hong Kong as well. Japanese companies have regularly held study
groups to seek insights from the Art of
War that may be implemented as corporate strategy. Koreans, enduring intense international
pressure to revalue their currency, open their markets, and submit to trade
limitations just when prosperity is attainable, are discovering strategies for
international business warfare in these books.
In Taiwan, where companies confront a situation similar to Korea’s,
books applying the thoughts of the ancient strategists to life, business,
sports, and the stock market have suddenly surged in popularity, even though
modernists have ignored and scorned them for decades. Perhaps more astounding is the penchant of
Japanese writers to apply principles and tactics from the Seven Military
Classics to all the complexities of modern society; they use such tactics, for
example, for successful human relations, romantic liaisons, and company
infighting. In addition to at least one
scholarly translation, several new paperbacks offering simplified renditions
and popularized expansions of selected teachings are published annually in
[D] “The basic point is a simple one, and it
applies to the widest range of industrial products: after things work well
people want them to look well. After
utility comes design. And design depends
not alone on the availability of artists; it invokes depth and quality of the
whole artistic tradition. It is on this that industrial success comes to
depend.
Proof is wonderfully evident once we learn to look for it. One of the
miracles of modern industrial achievement has been
[E] With respect to publications in the NES: “Whereas
the number of publications in the E.U. is steadily increasing, the rate is
declining in the
[F] “The Physiocrats would have influenced the
allocation of resources directly, as they deemed necessary; and, moreover,
pervasively, by controlling the particular institutional environment within
which resource allocation takes place, to wit, so as to direct resources to
agriculture - neither of which is Smithian. The free market of Smith was relatively
spontaneous, autonomous and viable; that of the Physiocrats would not be the
opposite but it would be a manipulated economy.
To Smith, government had positive tasks but was to be relatively passive
insofar as resource allocation and economic development were concerned; to the
Physiocrats, government was to supervise actively the performance of the
economy (thus antedating contemporary programs of economic development).”
(Samuels 1962, 159)
The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy