For Drucker, however, the transformation didn’t stop with Taylor. He observed an increasingly central role for knowledge as capitalism changed over the twentieth century. Thus, while the period after the 1880s saw a productivity revolution, and the decades following 1945 a ‘management revolution’, it was in the ‘information revolution’ that he saw production increasingly based on the ‘application of knowledge to knowledge ’. While knowledge had always been important – after all, the essence of the First Disruption resided in mastering the information content of crops and animals through selective breeding – with the rise of digitisation and information technology, Drucker viewed this process as reaching some kind of end point, with labour, land and capital critically sidelined as factors of production.
In Marx, Keynes and Drucker, we are ofered three futures, each articulating a society beyond capitalism only made possible by its fullest development. While it seemed otherwise for much of the last century, it now appears that in regard to declining living standards, regardless of productivity improvements, Marx was right, and Keynes wrong. Technological change can potentially lead us to abundance, as Keynes so bravely predicted in 1930, but only if it is accompanied by a politics that demands as much. And Drucker? What he correctly grasped was where value was increasingly located – in information.
But what none of the three clearly outlined is precisely how this new mode of production would stitch itself into the fabric of the present. Remarkably the person who did – almost without knowing it – would later become the chief economist for the World Bank. His name is Paul Romer.
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chaos under heaven