Twenty-first Century Economics

As the 21st century looms ahead, it is becoming clear that economic life will be different on the other side of the millennium. Attempts at communism have failed, new corporate structures are constantly emerging, government is being reinvented, entirely new industries are being born, and the world is gelling into a global market governed by the imperatives of knowledge. In this text editors, Halal and Taylor have assembled a group of leading economists and scholars to provide authoritative analyses of the powerful forces now shaping economic systems, and to estimate where these trends are headed. The essays compare the Information Revolution of today to the Industrial Revolution of yesterday, and show how for the first time in history, economic affairs are being organized around the pursuit of knowledge. Exploring the causes and the effects of this new technological foundation for economic systems, the chapters reveal the invigorating benefits and unprecedented challenges that are sure to be a part of what some call the "central nervous system" of knowledge and information.