De Adam Smith a Yochai Benkler. Desde el siglo XVIII, se sabe que la riqueza de las naciones (y sus ciudadanos) se genera en los mercados. En la era de la información, los mercados se amplian con las redes sociales, y las riqueza de las redes reside en los mecanismos de producción social basados en la colaboración no mediada necesariamente por transacciones económicas. David Warsh propone ahora en su nuevo libro (Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations) que el conocimiento es la base de la riqueza de las naciones. Para ello realiza un viaje por las últimas décadas de investigación económica a partir de la teoría del crecimiento endógeno de Paul Romer:
In 1980, the twenty-four-year-old graduate student Paul Romer tackled one of the oldest puzzles in economics. Eight years later he solved it and published a paper that became the flashpoint of a decade-long debate among growth economists. In Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations, economic journalist David Warsh uses Romer’s paper as the central redoubt from which to view modern economics and one of the discipline’s oldest riddles. The paradox of falling costs, first identified by Adam Smith more than 200 years ago, came to haunt economics throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—because while the problem was apparent, the tools to solve it were not.
…
The results were fundamental. In a radical transformation, economists eventually succeeded in resolving Smith’s 200-year-old quandary by internalizing technological change, and the ideas that spawn it, as part and parcel of economic growth instead of a parallel development. “New growth” as the theory came to be called, shows how the new ideas that are integral to economic growth fit into the economic system. Placing ideas at the center of this system helps to explain the dominance of first-mover firms like Microsoft or Google, underscores the value of intellectual property, and provides essential advice to those concerned with the expansion of the economy.
Pero, sin tratar de hacer un juego de palabras, el conocimiento reside realmente en las redes, como muestra el (también nuevo) libro de AnnaLee Saxenian The New Argonauts: Regional Advantage in a Global Economy:
Like the Greeks who sailed with Jason in search of the Golden Fleece, the new Argonauts--foreign-born, technically skilled entrepreneurs who travel back and forth between Silicon Valley and their home countries--seek their fortune in distant lands by launching companies far from established centers of skill and technology. Their story illuminates profound transformations in the global economy.
Este libro analiza la historia de los inmigrantes en Silicon Valley, pero sus conclusiones pueden ser generalizables a muchas otras regiones mundiales. La emigración, la fertilización cruzada de ideas, experiencia y recursos entre culturas y comunidades, genera nuevo conocimiento gracias a las conexiones entre actores previamente desconectados entre si. Una buena revisión del libro de Saxennian puede consultarse en Economic Principals, la revista editada por el propio David Warsh. Y un análisis comparado de ambos libros en BabsonKnowledge y en el blog del libro de Warsh:
He is right, of course. Knowledge doesn’t flow from place to place along currents in the upper atmosphere, like some fairy dust, or even person-to-person over the Internet. It is laboriously acquired by immigrant students, scientists and engineers, who, under some circumstances, may return to their homelands and, again, under certain circumstances, start companies that may in time, often surprisingy little time, become substantial industries.
Descubrí el libro de Warsh gracias a Tyler Cowen en Marginal Revolution, que propone que “Maybe this is the book of the year so far” y “While it pretends to focus on a single article - Paul Romer's 1990 piece on endogenous growth - the book is a tour de force through growth theory, the economics profession, the world of public intellectuals, and how science works”.
