EU hails reforms as productivity growth overtakes US - Business

Daniel W. Rasmus writes: It is important to remember that this is one metric among many. Productivity is seen as a primary means of generating wealth, but productivity is an invention of the industrial age mind. Europe, more than most places on Earth, needs to be very concerned with sustainability. This immediate increase in industrial age wealth creation does not reflect deeper issues the an aging population.  EU hails reforms as productivity growth overtakes US - Business. The knowledge economy is not about the production of things, but the production of intangibles, of intellectual property that may have intrinsic value but no current value, and it may have value, but not value that can easily be monetized using current methods and markets.

Productivity is part of a larger debate about transition and ideology, as nations and associations of nations redefine their value in the 21st century. The knowledge-based economy is not about Information and Communications Technology (ICT) it is about the bits that travel between people, and what those people do with those bits - how they internalize them, how they enhance them, how they make them real through implementation, through augmentation or through animation. For the knowledge economy to be real, its metrics need to be independent of its means - just as industrial productivity was defined by output, not by the inputs of people, or capital or robotics. The knowledge economy needs an economic system that recognizes commonality between various outcomes, in the same way that manufacturing output could be measured against the same metric, regardless of product.

The EU must balance between industrial age cheering and the knowledge economy. The one this that is sure, is that sustaining industrial age productivity does not create a sustainable knowledge economy. Even without the proper mathematics, I can intuit the flaws in that equation.