Industrial Age to Knowledge-Economy

? Rahul Dutta | October 21, 2022 | 9th Issue

Introduction

It is seen from records that the cost of maintaining and defending political borders i.e.?the global defense budget has crossed $ 2 trillion ?for the first time.??In stark contrast to this, the??World Health Organization (WHO) Report ??gives the following facts which are worth consideration:

• 828 million people were suffering from hunger in 2021.?
• Around 2.3 billion people (29.3%) of the world population moderately or severely faced hunger in 2021.
• Almost 3.1 billion people could not afford a healthy diet in 2021.
• An estimated?45 million?children under the age of five were suffering from wasting, the deadliest form of malnutrition, which increases children’s risk of death by up to 12 times. Furthermore,?149 million?children under the age of five had stunted growth and development due to a chronic lack of essential nutrients in their diets, while?39 million?were overweight.
• It is projected that nearly?670 million?people (8%?of the global population) will still be facing hunger in 2030.

Intellectual Property is primarily all about the use of Knowledge for spreading prosperity and wealth across both the monopoly solutions holders and the public at large. However, as long as the first-generation rights do not reach the last deprived person, the progress of mankind is not worth celebrating. Hunger concentration in Africa is alarming. Hunger signifies struggle for the first generation rights, for the bare necessity. As the first-generation rights, both education and affordability to the IP-embedded tangibles are out of the question. During the WTO formation days, the ‘global village’ ?word was coined. In a village, self-sufficiency is the key to its existence that comes from interdependency. The ‘global village’, even after two years short of three decades of the WTO formation, remains a pipe dream. The?Global Hunger Index 2022 ?released by the NGO?Concern Worldwide ?reports that?a person is dying of hunger every 48 seconds across Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia.?Afghanistan is the least peaceful country in the world for the fourth consecutive year, followed by Yemen, Syria, South Sudan, and Iraq.?War-torn Yemen and Syria; newly created South Sudan are struggling to revive their economies from the devastation caused by a military attack carried out by the US.??All these four ‘dangerous’ countries are in Africa.

It is therefore not surprising that there is a correlation between the?Global Hunger Index 2022?and the?Global Peace Index 2021 ?released annually by the?Institute for Economics and Peace .?

The Global Peace Index, 2021 reveals that global peacefulness has fallen in the last 15 years with the average country score deteriorating. This is in turn corroborated by the?Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) ?in its report, ‘Trends in the World Military Expenditure ’, which states that for?the first time the world military expenditure has crossed two trillion dollars (US$ 2113)!

It can be thereby construed that in spite of the gulf between the rights of people at the two different ends of the spectrum being so wide it is seen that?the investment in the bullet is still preferred as compared to the investment in grains.?

Renowned Jurist?John Rawls?in his book?A?Theory of Justice?proposes two principles of justice as follows:

• Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive scheme of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for others.
• Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) reasonably expected to be everyone’s advantage and (b) attached to positions and offices open to all.

Further, John Rawls writes that these two principles are a special case of a more general conception of justice that can be expressed as follows:

All social values, liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the social bases of self-respect are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any, or all, of these values, is to everyone’s advantage.?

Injustice, then, is simply inequalities that are not to the benefit of all.??

As per the Global Hunger Index and Global Peace Index mentioned above, in the global village, the reign of injustice prevails. Africa, the epicenter of hunger and insecurity, is a continent of contrast. The?United Nations Environment Program ?on its web states the following about Africa:

Africa is rich in natural resources ranging from arable land, water, oil, natural gas, minerals, forests, and wildlife.?

Africa is?home to some 30 percent of the world’s mineral reserves,?eight percent of the world’s natural Gas, and 12 percent of the world’s oil reserves.?The continent has?40 percent of the world’s gold?and?up to 90 percent of its chromium and platinum. The?largest reserves of cobalt, diamonds, platinum, and uranium in the world?are in Africa. It holds?65 percent of the world’s arable land and ten percent of the planet’s internal renewable fresh water source.

In most African countries,?natural capital accounts for between 30 percent and 50 percent of total wealth. [..]?Africa loses an estimated US$ 195 billion annually?of its natural capital through illicit financial flows, illegal mining, illegal logging, the illegal trade in wildlife, unregulated fishing, and environmental degradation and loss.

A rich but weak African continent is easy prey! It is in the interest of those powers who do not care for the principles propounded by eminent jurists like John Rawls but are involved in looting the natural wealth of Africa under the guise of injustice, insecurity, instability, and poverty of the local population. The surrender of Afghanistan to the Taliban by the Allied forces in August 2021, is another case to point. The Afghan males, especially young, attempted to flee the country leaving behind all human relations. Some even clung to the body of the plane in desperation. Despite that, Afghanistan retained the 1st?position in the Global Peace Index.

History is replete with examples of looting prosperous territories, annexing them, and using the annexed territories' human resources forcefully for slavery. Will the shameful and dark past of human civilization get over with the solemn proclamation of ‘We the People’ adopt a constitution for self-rule by the public as a democracy? It is seen that the revolutions for self-rule have served as gunpowder to destroy the feudal structures in the Republics in most parts of the world. However, as the people’s sentiments are largely about their ‘own people the world remains divided into political borders. The force to maintain the ‘national interests' and the political borders are so owner-powering that the concept of the ‘global village’ and efforts to try and bridge the gaps in the rights of people across the globe appears quite distant.?

Intellectual Property at Macro Level

The basic premise of a Republic is to serve the people by people as a Welfare State. The resources pooled in taxes were meant to be utilized in building the national infrastructure and public welfare.?

The natural resources are not distributed uniformly across nations. The pre-industrial-age civilizations were agriculture-based economies and were mostly self-sustaining and self-dependent.

The Industrial Age forced?the countries of that era to find ‘markets’ outside the national territories. Also, more resources?were required to sustain production.?

The trading trump card is based on the tenant of ‘mutual benefit'. When just means of trade did not work, unfair means were devised to monopolize foreign markets. When the traders became powerful they set up a system of perpetually looting the colony’s resources in a legal manner. The self-proclaimed rulers of India.?The British looted 45 trillion worth of resources from India over two centuries . The looted resources propelled the Industrial Revolution in Britain and made it the most powerful nation in the world. The same?modus operandi?was shamelessly adopted in annexing other foreign territories as colonies through unthinkable human rights violations including slavery. It was famously said that the sun never sets in Her Majesty’s empire. Needless to say that the British were not the only perpetrators, there were many others following the same tactics.

India is celebrating 75 years of Independence from British misrule. The British perpetrated most of the misdeeds under the influence of lust, power, and, exploitation. The British tyranny continued for over two centuries. The self-proclaimed justice-respecting intellectual elite British wrote fiction of their greatness while their misdeeds in their colonies were either glossed over or swept under the carpet.??The British proclaim to be the people who shaped the world in the hypocrisy of the highest order. Neither the British were the only colonizers nor was India the only colony. Even today there is no official regret by the Britishers for the wrongs perpetrated by them.

The takeaway point is that the Industrial Age not only started the beginning of?looting others' resources and prosperity but also initiated an era their greatness which came at a great cost for the colonized countries.?

The Knowledge Economy Czars

The passion of James Watt?for his invention made him bankrupt though finally, he proved himself through faith in his knowledge. This was the time for the contemporary developed world to realize the real power of knowledge in shaping the world as a just global village.

Knowledge has always played an important part in the development and progress of human civilization. The knowledge economy has proved that social bonding is weaker than economic bonding. These economies lured talent from across the world. However, using this newfound prosperity through knowledge they devised subtle means of colonization. They also sabotaged the chances of others aspiring for a better life by erecting physical and economic barriers like the?great?Trump wall .?

The?Global 2000 listing of MNCs ?released by Forbes for 2022, shows the rise of the Knowledge economies and thus the development of the new world order as follows:

the companies on the 2022 Global 2000 account for?$47.6 trillion?in revenues,?$5.0 trillion?in profits,?$233.7 trillion?in assets, and?$76.5 trillion?in market cap. There are 58 countries represented on the 2022 list. The United States has the most with 590 companies, followed by China/Hong Kong (351) and Japan (196).

The new, refined and subtle means of funneling wealth from the global village is through corporate means. The role of the Government is to enable the globally acceptable mechanism to facilitate the MNCs to successfully achieve their targets. These MNCs in gratitude do not pay their due taxes! In a?UN University web-published Blog , it is informed that?the MNCs use three channels of profit shifting from high-tax countries. These channels are debt shifting, registering IP in tax heaven countries, and strategic transfer pricing. Every year it is estimated that around?$420 billion?in corporate profit is shifted out of the 79 countries amounting to?$125 billion?in tax revenue loss to these countries.

The Clash with Nature

The fossil fuel-hungry industrial age machines have harmed Nature. There is a bare minimum commitment of the industrialized countries to restrict the global temperature rise. It was the?Paris Agreement ?wherein it was agreed to take corrective action to reduce greenhouse gases emission to limit global warming not to rise more than 1.5 degree Celsius in the next five years. The global temperature rise is a threat to the very existence of life in all its forms.

Ideally, the bigger the greenhouse gas emission country, the bigger its responsibility to check the greenhouse emissions. According to?the World Resources Institute , China, the European Union, and the US are the top three greenhouse gas emitters contributing?41.5%?of the total greenhouse gases emission.

Wars happen when the peaceful means of solving disputes are exhausted. The development of non-violent means like economic sanctions has proved to be equally helpful for powerful countries to resolve disputes in their favor. The warfare material, like bombs, also contributes to the release of energy and increase in temperature. However, this is not mentioned as the source of global temperature rise.?

The facts show that the world is in the transition phase from Industrial Age to Knowledge Economy. It is a primitive Knowledge Economy.

Concluding

The ancient Indian wisdom says ‘let all be blessed’. It was the wisdom of fire (purity) worshippers. The basic objective of the World Trade Organization (WTO) is?to open trade for the benefit of all. The difference in generation levels of rights cannot facilitate (equitable) trade. There is no correlation between the majority struggling to win the first generation rights in developing countries and a small fraction of people enjoying fourth and fifth-generation rights in the developed world. The knowledge economy is an opportunity to treat a man as an equal man. The world needs to shed away the industrial age practices of lust, selfishness, and loot.

Knowledge in its purest form will lead to?letting all be blessed?spirits?and raising the global?average of rights. It should eventually evolve the new global order for a united human civilization. For the survival of 8 billion people on our planet under challenges like climate change, a justice-based global society is the need of the hour. Hundred years later History will judge Knowledge Economy by its own standards. Let history not repeat itself. The should be no space for pictures like the one from the devastation of Japan in World War 2 shown below: