Knowledge for Development of What?

Different people have different needs for knowledge at different times.

Think about driving at 65 miles an hour and seeing the cars in front of you suddenly crash. You would have an immediate, urgent need for the skills to avoid the accident and getting killed, and you would not be very receptive to information at that moment on how to get richer or happier. (I suppose that by analogy, the world has an urgent need for knowledge of how to avoid an environmental crash which it seems to be rushing towards in this century.)

The billion poorest people in the world need knowledge urgently to increase their probability of survival. These are folk who have grave difficulty getting enough to eat, who are victims of the diseases of poverty, and who live desperate lives.

Half the world’s population lives in poverty. Two to two and a half billion people are not so badly off as the poorest, but still are caught in a poverty trap. They are generally poorly educated and poorly governed, living in impoverished environments, under threat of war and conflict. Perhaps the most pressing need of these people is for knowledge to spring that poverty trap, and allow them to join the peoples in East Asia and other regions who are gaining decent lives.

At the other end of the scale, consider the billion people who now own computers and are connected to the Internet. This group is probably a good surrogate for the richest billion people in the world. They are not hungry unless they choose to be, and they enjoy a life expectancy that appears to be approaching the limits defined by our genetic heritage.

These are the folk who have been most avidly discussing the “knowledge economy”. It would seem that their priority is for the acquisition of knowledge to enable still higher levels of acquisition of goods and services and of wealth – knowledge for the development of monetary income!

An alternative would be to give priority to the acquisition of knowledge that would contribute to development of a better improve the quality of life. This might involve knowledge that would allow them to live in a more attractive and sustainable environment. Certainly, many in this group would gladly trade money for leisure, so they might seek knowledge to enable them to live a comfortable life with less work.

This still seems a hedonic view, and I wonder whether we should rather seek knowledge to allow us to live more wisely. Perhaps if we focused on the knowledge for the development of wisdom for the economic elite, we would find ourselves in a world in which they recognized a greater moral responsibility for the welfare of the rest. Perhaps that would end being truly knowledge for the development of all.