Thoughts On Economics
Dean Baker's Rigged And Robert Reich's Saving Capitalism
Robert Vienneau
An economics, investment, trading and policy blog with a focus on Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). We seek the truth, avoid the mainstream and are virulently anti-neoliberalism.
Setting aside that our economy is by and large organized to benefit a State-financial Elite and the technocrat Caste that serves them, let's consider the two classes of worker in what Peter Drucker labeled the Knowledge Economy in his 1993 book Post-Capitalist Society.
At the risk of simplifying Drucker's nuanced account, here is a precis:
The Marxist class division of labor vs. capitalist/management no longer adequately describes the new economy, as knowledge workers own "the means of production" which is first and foremost knowledge. Corporations and government offer an organization within which workers can apply their knowledge (i.e. the means of production in a knowledge economy).
Since the new economy is no longer characterized by capital vs. labor, it is a post-capitalist economy.
Knowledge workers are a minority of the workforce; the majority are service workers, either skilled or low-skilled.Of Two Minds
Economist Robert B. Reich divides the workforce into similar categories: "symbolic analysts" (knowledge workers) and two classes of service workers: "routine producers" and "in-person servers."