Chapter 7: Changing Views of Economics of Inequality and Implications for Leadership and Learning

The new view of knowledge economics began as a thought that societies advanced when large, new ideas came into play for that society. When ocean-going sailing ships could move around the world and trade (or plunder), whole nations grew in wealth. When the green revolution found ways of getting more produce out of a hectare of land, Asia began to move out of poverty toward industrialization. When antibiotics were discovered, some large-scale diseases began to be controlled. When people first began to discover how to plant crops, they were freed to begin to build civilizations. This notion, that it is the power of ideas that explained how societies and civilization leaped forward, began a rethink of how economics worked. Ultimately, it is challenging the very fundamentals of long-held neoclassical economics and is a classic epistemological battle within a profession (Kuhn, 1970; Mirowski, 2009; Warsh, 2007). But, primarily, it has caused economics to ask how knowledge and ideas work as economic units. This, necessarily, has caused researchers to ask the question of what knowledge is in an age of digitization—when actual facts are so abundant and easily accessible that the notion that they must be memorized is substantially questioned (Sawyer, 2006a; Weinberger, 2011). So, attention has turned from knowledge defined as facts to knowledge defined as “flow” learning (Sawyer, 2006a).