_________________The Knowledge Economy_______________

The knowledge Economy is the basic economic paradigm at work in the world today. It’s well known, industrial development. The Knowledge Economy is people moving up to better jobs with economic growth. The essence is a good job will be created and someone will get on the job training and move up while the position he or she leaves is filled from below. Then there is this domino effect in the labour markets that will focus economic growth on the very bottom. When there’s robust economic growth the domino mechanism will cause shortages at bottom. This will actually raise minimum wage and subsequently contract the bottom, cause bankruptcies. All economic growth has the potential of improving the bottom thusly. The middle class will widen and this is actually a solution. That’s the Knowledge Economy. Conversely when there’s population increases, say the baby boom, it’s an enabler of weed like growth in minimum wage jobs, McLabour.

The Knowledge Economy actually makes the macro economics of immigration a nightmare. Without immigration, people at the bottom move up a bit. Immigration is this enabler of growth at the bottom by the reverse domino effect, displacing people downward.

In addition workers have a tax responsibility for government costs and the people at the bottom don’t carry their share. The subsidy at the bottom in the nanny state is steep, it’s prohibitive.

Suppression of minimum wage by immigration in the main immigrant destination cities has been an extremely heavy tax; the minimum wage workers actually pay the highest rate of taxation in the system.

In the modern situation exploitive jobs are too many and this affects the middle class through family, which widens the base concern for the worst off.

What’s keeping Western society together at this time is 5% to 15% of working people will drop out of the labour force, constitute a swing work force, if economic conditions are bad. This makes the official unemployment figure a mirage.

You can see, hear and read about the soft economy at the bottom of rich cities. In every major city you can see there is endless strip malls, retail, fast food outlets and restaurants, all paying minimum wage or a dollar or two more. Everyone in a modern city will know some one working in the low wage sector, so there will be discussions about this. There are various statistics in the newspapers detailing the extent of the soft economy at the bottom too, so one reads about it. What it actually is is a government program, immigration. It’s central planning of the economy. It’s feckless spending by politicians on a scale not dissimilar to the massive fiscal deficits.

With the reminder our values, including immigrant values, are progress and family you have a sale. Even the bleeding hearts are being welcomed aboard.

All this is intuitive, McLabour makes no sense in a rich city, and the problem has been a mix up in economics, by economists who forgot the Knowledge Economy.

You are not describing the knowledge economy but the trickle down economics. In the economy, knowledge is used to program the automated machines that are replacing workers definitively. Our immigration policy is a brain drain that is accelerating this fantastic substitution.

Japan's development in the 1950s, 60s and 70s is the prime example of the thing I'm describing. The Knowledge Economy paradigm is what the emergining economies are all trying to do. These economies will mechanize so productivity and wages increase. The key thing is the worst companies are sent packing.

Complaining that mechanization decreases jobs is an old chestnut and over looks that jobs are created readily in capitalistic societies.

Trickle down is where spending creates jobs and the people at the bottom get employed. It's entirely different idea.

And what? They caught up.

A knowledge economy is a winner-take-all economy: the first economic agent who gets a patent is the only one who can recoup his investment spendings (big time).

http://www.halfchangedworld.com/2006/11 ... nnert.html

You have good points, issues, in your economic posts, Benoit. My point of view is often different. For example R & D has a new reputation as being ever more difficult. The big, famous labs are hurting. ATT's Bell Labs, IBM's lab and here in Canada Nortel's big research arm have not saved their company. In fact they tended to put it out of business.