For millennia, social development was tantamount

to social survival: the daily goal of people, with the

exception of a tiny ruling minority, was to get by, make a

family, and steal a few moments of joy out of the harshness

of the human condition. This is still the lot of many. Yet over

the last two centuries, with the advent of the industrial age,

social development came to involve the goal of improving

people’s livelihood. Capital accumulation and investment,

technological development geared towards material

production, and massive inputs of labor and natural resources

were the generators of wealth, both under capitalism and

under statism. Social struggles and political reform or

revolution took care of diffusing the harvest of productivity

within society at large, albeit2 with the shortcomings of a

world divided between North and South, and organized in

class societies that tended to reproduce themselves.

There is something new in the information age. It

can be empirically argued that at the source of productivity

and competitiveness (that jointly determine the generation of

wealth and its differential appropriation by economic units),

there is the capacity to generate new knowledge and to

process relevant information efficiently. To be sure,

information and knowledge have always been essential

factors in power and production. Yet it is only when new

information and communication technologies empower

humankind with the ability incessantly to feed knowledge

back into knowledge, experience into experience, that there

is, at the same time, unprecedented productivity potential,

and an especially close link between the activity of the mind,

on the one hand, and material production, be it of goods or

services, on the other.

tantamount – being almost the same or having the same effect;

albeit – used to reduce to strength and effect of what has just been said,

although.

UNRISD Discussion Paper n.º 114 (with adaptations).