There’s no question that some will benefit greatly from the knowledge economy. But the idea that education will permit every laborer to transform himself into a productive knowledge worker is growing increasingly dubious, which means that a new form of economic quasi-feudalism may be more or less inevitable:
You can now watch the liquidation of the American Dream in real time. Any given week, the guts of a whole factory are auctioned off. Its contents are sold piece by piece and taken away for scrap or antiques or resale to foreign companies. Men with blowtorches and trucks haul off tool-and-die machines, aluminum siding, hoists, drinking fountains, salt and pepper shakers, anything that might be of some value. It is the removal of the country’s mechanical heart right before your eyes. It is breathtaking.
The reality is that most office workers are unnecessary, being inherently unproductive. Many are engaged in little more than transferring information from point A to point B, and will become redundant as information transfer technology continues to improve. Just to give one example, I have created a technology design that will render 95 percent of all university professors surplus to requirements; the only reason that they are required now is that the present means of information transfer at the universities still operate in a wildly outdated and inefficient manner due to the present limits of technology.
But what will the professors at every petty state and local university do when everyone around the world can attend the exactly the same course at Oxford with precisely the same – if not superior – level of quality presently being provided to those who attend college classes there? Obviously, those elite professors tapping into a much larger revenue stream will be much better off, as will Oxford University and I, being in control of the technology.
The rest of the universities and professors will not be better off and they will either have to find some other service to provide or go extinct. This is just one of many examples; as efficiency in information transfer improves, the information-tranferring employee will become as unnecessary as the craftsman became once the concept of the division of labor allowed unskilled workers to produce physical goods of similar quality in greater quantities at lower cost.
I suspect that recognition of this ongoing economic transformation may, in part, lie behind the unconcern of the elite with regards to demographic decline and their apparent determination to construct a new social structure that is more similar to the historical pyramid of many past societies.