The Politics of the American Knowledge Economy* Nicholas Short Harvard University
[email protected] August 07, 2020 Abstract The American knowledge economy (AKE) is not a mysterious transition in the organization of economic production. It is instead a politically generated consensus for producing economic prosperity in which intellectual property, and the businesses that produce it, play a leading role. The history of AKE development reveals as much and also shows that, while the legal regimes governing the AKE achieved bipartisan consensus, the AKE would not have emerged without a fundamental realignment within the Democratic Party. The history also shows that the AKE has severe distributional consequences and recent empirical work reinforces the view that the AKE is an engine of geographic, economic, and political inequality. Contents 1 Introduction 2 2 Characterizing Knowledge Economies 3 3 The Post-War Consensus and the American Knowledge Society 6 4 Three Geographies for American Knowledge Economy Development 10 4.1 The global knowledge economy . 11 4.2 The national industrial innovation debate . 15 4.3 The entrepreneurial states . 20 5 The American Knowledge Economy as an Engine of Inequality 23 5.1 Geographic inequality . 24 5.2 Economic inequality . 27 5.3 Political inequality . 30 6 Conclusion 31 *Thanks will go here. 1 1 Introduction For more than forty years, scholars have explored the idea first articulated by Bell (1974) and others that, starting in the 1970s, the United States transitioned from a Fordist economy rooted