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Manfred Fuellsack * Specialized knowledge production and (the limits of) its remuneration - Basic Income as an alternative? (was: [ox-en] Conference documentation / Konferenzdokumentation)



Specialized knowledge production and (the limits of) its remuneration
=====================================================================

Basic Income as an alternative?
-------------------------------

Manfred Füllsack [manfred.fuellsack at univie.ac.at]

The presentation will try to assess the potential of a Basic Income to
solve or at least to alleviate a fundamental problem commonly met in
the context of "specialized knowledge production": the problem of its
remuneration , or in other words, the problem that not every kind of
specialized knowledge by itself is able to generate sufficient
revenues to enable those who produce, process or distribute it to live
on.

Based not on "ethical" conceptions of the one or the other type, but
on a general theory of differentiation the presentation will 1.) try
to show that the detachment of the terms of knowledge production and
the terms of its remuneration as it would be incited by a Basic Income
is nothing essentially new in history. And 2.) it will give an
overview about the current social, economical and political
discussions, problems and prospects for the introduction of a Basic
Income.

Working paper - Not to be quoted without permission of the author!

The following considerations will try to assess the chances of a Basic
Income to "solve" or at least to "alleviate" a fundamental problem
commonly met in the context of specialized knowledge production: i.e.
the problem of its remuneration, or in other words, the problem that
not every kind of specialized knowledge production is creating
sufficient revenues to enable specialized knowledge producers to live
on and to continue their activities.

What is Basic Income?

"Basic Income is an income unconditionally granted to all on an
individual basis, without means test or work requirement", according
to the definition of BIEN, the Basic Income European Network
(http://www.basicincome.org)

Basic Income thus is a mean that detaches incomes from any kind of
labor activity, performance, service, commodity or good so far
considered conditional to incomes. Thus one might say, Basic Income
detaches these activities, performances, services, commodities or
goods from the overall social demand for them. In regard to our
subject, it detaches supply and demand of specialized knowledge
production.

Exactly this, however, is, as I will try to show, nothing new in
regard to specialized knowledge production.

My assumptions are that

1.   specialized knowledge production is per se subjected to immanent
     dynamics that differentiate and specialize it and thus inevitably
     create "gaps" between its supply and demand.

2.   These gaps endanger the continuation of specialized knowledge
     production and thus constantly ask for ways to "bridge" them.

3.   However, the principal ways society so far has "convened" on in
     order to solve these problems, are

     1.   themselves products of specialized knowledge production and
          therefore subjected to the same immanent differentiation
          dynamics.

     2.   And they are as a rule exclusive. In other words they
          include some kinds of knowledge production and knowledge
          producers into its range of effect, and exclude others.

4.   As a consequence, they so far constantly tend to widen the gaps
     between supply and demand of knowledge production which they were
     meant to bridge.

5.   In regard to these fundamental problems I finally shall consider
     some aspects of Basic Income in regard to its chances to bridge
     these gaps more "effectively".

1. The "immanent logic of specialized knowledge production"
===========================================================

Why is knowledge production permanently differentiating and
specializing?

Knowledge production is, as is well known, in many ways a very unique
and particular activity. One of its characteristics is that it in its
own rights constantly and inevitably generates not-knowledge, i.e.
ignorance.

Knowledge production, one might say, carries a "dark side" which is
responsible for the fact that the more we know, the more we usually
also know how much we do not yet know. Knowledge production, so to
speak, steadily produces knowledge about things, spheres and phenomena
about which it would be good to know more. Every knowledge producer
probably knows the annoying phenomenon that with every new book for
instance that he opens in order to inform on existing solutions for
his problems he encounters dozens of more books also promising
prospective solutions. Think about scientific books in this regard,
that usually contain literature lists in the end with other scientific
books worth reading which in their own turn contain again literature
lists, and so on.

More abstractly explained, the reason why knowledge production
constantly produces ignorance lies in the circumstance that every
particle of newly generated knowledge defines a new state of
knowledge, a new cultural level one might say, from which the world
appears under new aspects. Knowing how to construct gasoline engines
for instance brings up the possibility to put them on wheels and
therewith to mobilize society. As a consequence however, this
knowledge also creates ignorance about how to guarantee a steady
supply of petrol for instance, or the provision of parking spots in
big cities etc. Knowing about how to operate computers brings up the
possibility to connect them to each other and in consequence creates
ignorance about how to cope with internet viruses, spam mails, hoaxes
etc. In other words, while the production of knowledge is solving
problems, it inevitably at the same time generates new problems that
were not to be seen before this knowledge was available.

Unfortunately, this is (as can be shown more consistently in terms of
System Theory) an inevitable feature of knowledge production. I will
call it therefore the "immanent logic of knowledge production". It is
a feature that incessantly differentiates and specializes knowledge
production, because each ignorance (each problem) that arises anew in
consequence to the creation of knowledge asks for new knowledge
(solution) in its own turn. The attempts to create these constantly
anew demanded knowledges (i.e. the attempts to solve these problems)
thus can do no other than to incessantly differentiate and specialize.
And as we well know, they tend to differentiate and specialize up to a
degree on which this differentiation and specialization itself becomes
problematic in manifold ways and starts to demand solutions in its own
turn, solutions for which, in order to generate them, again knowledge
producers have to specialize - knowledge producers, so to speak, that
are specialized on the problem of specialized knowledge production.

2. The demand for specialized knowledge production
==================================================

Specialized knowledge is, as the term suggests, knowledge that
distinguishes from common knowledge by the very fact that it is as a
rule not utilized all the time, but only in certain special
situations, and it is as a rule also not utilized by all of society,
but only by a small specialized part of it. Hence, specialized
knowledge can be distinguished from common knowledge by its relation
to market demand. While common knowledge might be demanded commonly,
specialized knowledge is knowledge demanded only on specialized
markets.

While one might suggest that common market demand and common knowledge
production develop somehow related to each other - by definition it
wouldn't be common knowledge if it wouldn't be demanded commonly -,
this is not necessarily the case with specialized market demand and
specialized knowledge production. Since the dynamics of the one as
well as the dynamics of the other are no longer determined by common
impulses but each in its own turn by very special ones, demand and
supply tend to substantially diverge in regard to specialized
knowledge production.

This divergence is well known and manifold described in artistic and
scientific history, but lets still illustrate it with a well-known
example from the history of specialized knowledge production: (as we
simplifying assume) the immanent logic of mathematical knowledge
production in the first half of the 19th century has brought up a
problem complex that challenged a knowledge producer by the name of
George Boole to detach mathematical formalisms from the interpretation
of their content and develop by this an abstract algebra that even the
highly specialized market for mathematics did not have much demand for
at the time. As we know, however, this algebra became highly demanded
more than hundred years later due to the immanent logics of a
completely different specialized market for knowledge products - the
computer and IT-technology.

As the example shows, the immanent logics of specialized knowledge
production and the immanent logics of specialized markets are not
always and necessarily once and for all pointing in opposite
directions. It therefore does not seem absolutely obvious that supply
and demand never can meet again. In regard to this possibility,
society has undertaken, as we know, various efforts to "connect" or
"correlate" supply and demand of specialized knowledge production. In
order to secure the continuation of this production (the necessity of
which after all has been recognized at least at times by some society
members, although, as we will see, rather due to economic interests
than to "enlighted" farsightedness), society has, as we, a bit
sarcastically, might say, "convened" on a couple of institutions in
the hope to bridge the steadily rising gap between supply and demand
in regard to knowledge production.

Two famous examples for such institutions we shall regard a bit
closer. They are: 1.) intellectual property rights, and 2.) scientific
institutions.

Ad 1. intellectual property rights
----------------------------------

The first intellectual property rights were, as far as we know,
introduced in regard to rather particular economic interests in the
15th and 16th century, when sovereigns in England and Italy considered
it beneficial to concede privileges for the commercialization of
inventions to certain interest groups. The first "copyright" for
example has not been granted as a property right to authors in
general, but in reaction to the invention of the printing press in
1476 to the London Stationers Company, the guild of British
letterpress printers, in the form of a privilege to exclusively sale
their products and to find and destroy illegal copies. The first known
patent for an industrial innovation seems to have been the privilege
of a certain Filippo Brunelleschi in 1421 to exploit his invention of
a crane on a boat to transport marble blocks for three years
exclusively.

In both cases the introduction of these privileges have been reactions
to particular economic interests and not to the general problem of the
differentiation of supply and demand of knowledge production. In both
cases, however, the underlying problem has been the well-known fact
that knowledge products can to some extent be copied without being
consumed. Knowledge thus can be commercialized by those who don't have
it, and can be sold by those who don't owe it. Therefore with the
progressing differentiation of knowledge production and market
dynamics, i.e. with the divergence of supply and demand of specialized
knowledge, the probability was on the rise that the production and
commercialization of knowledge will differentiate as well. In other
words, the risk was increasing that others than specialized knowledge
producers will profit from their products and specialized knowledge
production therefore might come to a halt.

At first, this problem was tackled by conceding monopolies to certain
individuals or lobbies in order to give them exclusive chances to
satisfy occurring demands without competition. However, these
concessions soon proved to have negative effects on the progress of
knowledge production itself. Individually granted copyrights as well
as patents could do no other than to include some and exclude others
from the use and from the sale of knowledge, thus restricting access
also for potential innovators. As a consequence, in the year 1624 the
British parliament undertook it to abolish most individually granted
monopolies in the famous "Statute of Monopolies" by generalizing them
in special "Letters of Patent" for all "first and actual inventors" of
intellectual products for up to 14 years. Eventually, as we know,
intellectual products were attributed as formal property to its
authors in the French patent law of 1791 and finally in most
industrialized countries after the economic crisis of 1873 when free
trade ideology lost ground against more regulative economical
conceptions.

The producers of specialized knowledge therewith seemed to have gained
an effective mean to keep their production at least somehow in touch
with the dynamics on specialized markets. At least they now should be
able to answer arising demands on the knowledge market exclusively on
their own. With the institution of intellectual property rights they
should be able to promote, with whatever kind of revenues the
commercialization of their products might bring, "the progress of
science and useful arts", as the US-constitution in this regard
states.

However, as we know, intellectual property rights are plagued with a
wide variety of problems. At first, the very fact that they are highly
specialized knowledge products themselves asks for further
specialization in order to be able to process, control and maintain
them. And here again, the more special and particular intellectual
property rights have to become in reaction to the steady influx of new
forms of knowledge, new forms of copying, new forms of archiving, new
forms of commercialization, new markets for knowledge, copying,
archiving and commercialization etc., the more the degree of overall
specialization rises, and the more supply and demand of specialized
knowledge diverges. The consequences are well known: highly
bueroacratique organizations that hopelessly lag behind actual
developments, and administrative costs of no relation to what can be
gained by intellectual property rights. In other words, what was meant
to "bridge" the rising gap between supply and demand only deepens it.
Intellectual property rights loose their potential to provide means
for specialized knowledge production. In the realm of science, for
instance, measurable stimulating effects on research they have only in
some disciplines like pharmacy or chemistry. (Gröndahl 2002: 95) And
this, in spite of concerted efforts for example of the US-government
to install them as prime incentives, by setting up patent-departments
in several big universities in the country, starting in the 1970ies.

Second, intellectual property rights, even if generalized for all
producers of knowledge, are still monopolies thus including some and
excluding others from the use of knowledge. This bears the danger that
some essential innovations or inventions are not made, or more
general, that some essential problems are not solved just because
those who would have the potential to do so do not have access to the
appropriate knowledge.

Examples are manifold and well described in literature: in the case of
so called "accumulative technologies" for instance - cars, airplanes,
computers etc. - innovations are essentially build on former
innovations which can't be realized if one of this former innovations
is blocked by a patent. (cf.: Merges/Nelson 1990: 884-898) As a
consequence, enterprises tend to strategically obtain
patent-portfolios, not for securing revenues, but for "cross
licensing" their patents in exchange for needed patents. Or they try
to surround their products by patent-thickets, dense webs "of
overlapping intellectual property rights that a company must hack its
way through in order to actually commercialize new technology"
(Shapiro 2001: 1-2)

Other meanwhile well known examples include the patenting of
traditional food (e.g. Basmati-rice) or medicine sources of indigenous
people (Frein 2002) or the project by Graig Venter for decoding the
human genome and trying to patent it for individual commercial
exploitation. (Kuhlen 2002).

And third, even if intellectual property rights somehow actually
provide certain possibilities to correlate supply and demand of
specialized knowledge, their affectivity is after all essentially
dependent on the arising of demand. What if it doesn't arise? Or if it
doesn't arise at the time when knowledge producers would need it to
continue their production? Or if it doesn't arise in their life time
at all?

For this case society has convened on a second institution that
similarly to intellectual property rights intends to bridge the gaps
between supply and demand of specialized knowledge production by
factually detaching it.

Ad 2. Scientific institutions
-----------------------------

Abstractly regarded the institutionalizing of highly specialized
knowledge production might be described as the exemption of knowledge
producers from the necessity to care for common problems. Only by
sparing them common problems they have a chance to deal with
specialized problems. In ancient societies for example, it might have
been priests and similar folk who have been exempted from profane
every day necessities of common people due to sacrifices and
contributions of natural produce that enabled the priests to
specialize, lets say, on ideal and orientational questions which were
not to be answered on a profane every day base.

A precondition for this, of course, has been a society of sufficient
affluence. Social productivity had to be high enough in order to
exempt some society members from profane work and "free" them for
specialization. Aristotle clear-sightedly described the first
mathematicians of Egypt as a consequence of the economic prosperity of
the land on the Nile and the English term "school" derives, as we
know, from the Greek word schole for "taking a break from work" and
the Latin word schola for idleness which later was used to label those
activities that monks were doing after work, i.e. when they were
trying to solve theoretical, philosophical or scientific problems
because the practical work was already done.

The introduction of schools had, as we know, far reaching consequences
for the specialization of knowledge production in its own turn. On the
one hand, knowledge now had to be organized, systematized and
condensed in order to pass it on in the form of tuition. Already this
by itself provided new impulses for specialization and soon concerned
a lot of annexed issues like didactics, pedagogy, rhetoric and many
more. The tasks of knowledge distribution could differentiate from
knowledge production therewith freeing the latter from the need to be
distributable. Hence, knowledge production in its own right could
further detach from societal demand. "Pure" scientists, philosophers,
intellectuals lost another important connection to the profane needs
of their society and could, if they could afford it, specialize on
unteachable issues.

On the other hand, knowledge distribution as well soon started to
support the successive detachment of knowledge from social demand.
When in Germany for example the plurality of early modern educational
institutions was unified in a system of secondary education the
universities, i.e. the tertiary educational system found itself
confronted with a broad influx of significantly better pre-educated
students. University teachers thus, so far bound to broader demand by
the necessity to prepare students for highly specialized knowledge
production, could significantly raise the abstractness level of their
activities. Universities, although still teaching institutions and
therefore by definition connected with social demand, were freed from
the necessity to teach basics at first and thus could become symbols
for processing highly specialized knowledge.

Even more these activities became detached from social demand when due
to the reputation and influence the profession of university teachers,
of professors, could gain, it became necessary to shelter these
professions from political or economic fluctuations. Tenures,
standardized wages and other social securities made university
teachers nearly impregnable against any fluctuations on the market for
specialized knowledge.

And again, detaching specialized knowledge production from social
demand further enhances its specialization and differentiation.
Subsequently, knowledge production follows its own dynamics - and this
in a wide plurality of disciplines which constantly contribute more
specialized knowledge to the existing stock of specialized knowledge
thus offering an ever increasing variety of competing states of
knowledge. As a consequence the half-life of knowledge dramatically
decreases. If about hundred years ago, specialized knowledge that
someone acquired in the course of his educational process seemed good
enough to provide job opportunities for a life time, today the state
of demanded knowledge seems to vary within months. Just to invest,
lets say, three month into learning to master a state of the art
computer program can be no means guarantee that this program will
still be state of the art after these three months. The rapidly
decreasing half life of specialized knowledge renders teaching
syllabi, educational programs and any conception for a carrier to the
imponderability of chance. University trainings today change their
objectives three or four times while still in progress. And sometimes
no training at all seems to be valued already higher than any
specialization. A cynical advertising jingle on the radio recently
answered the shy admission of a job aspirant not to dispose of any
qualification with the pleased outcry of the personnel manager
"perfect, then we don't have to retrain you".

What is more, the rapidly decreasing half life of specialized
knowledge self-referentially tends to turn back at the conditions of
specialized knowledge production itself. The permanent and ever more
rapidly proceeding replacement of knowledge by other knowledge, the
"succession of epistemes", renders attempts to estimate and value
knowledge more and more futile. Today, already a simple quest for
books and writings relevant for a given problem, can lead researches
into seemingly endless loops of literature research. The amount on
available knowledge in certain fields in many cases seems to reach the
limits of processibility by single researchers.

Even more grave this problem seems to concern the selection of those
who by virtue of their position for example in a specialized
organisation for knowledge processing gain definition power on what is
relevant and what is not relevant knowledge. Since already in middle
ages, the introduction of such organizations (schools, universities,
academies etc.) often has been more a consequence of special
interests, for example of those of religious orders to keep their
dogma and its distribution pure than an immanent necessity of
knowledge production itself, the positions in these organisations do
not necessarily correlate with the state of the art of knowledge
production. The history of science is full of famous examples that
impressively demonstrate how far "institutionalized" knowledge
production can diverge from knowledge production that follows "its
own", or more exactely different dynamics.

Today however, this discrepancy seems to be deepened by the fact that
these positions, due to tenures, social securities and many other
factors, in many cases dispose of considerable more stability in time
than the knowledge that was necessary to obtain them. The power to
decide what is relevant and what is not relevant knowledge, however,
in many cases is still bound to these positions. Universities rely on
them to select their faculty and as a consequence also to choose what
knowledge they process and teach. Scientific funds rely on them in
order to decide which projects to finance and which not. And also the
"users" of knowledge, the consumers, politicians, entrepreneurs, and
the broad public, rely on them in order to orientate on what is
relevant knowledge.

The more these positions are relied on, however, and the more they are
consequently stabilized by reputation and influence gained from
political assigments and consulting services for instance, the more
the rapidly shortening half-life of modern knowledge tends to detach
them from the actual forefront of knowledge production. Spending time
on consulting decreases the time for knowledge production, which in
regard to the time consuming endeavor of acquiring state of the art
knowledge can pose severe problems.

In short, the power to define what is relevant knowledge does not
necessarily result from the command of the most advanced knowledge
anymore. Knowledge gains relevance dependent on factors external to
its production, and thus becomes in terms of its value arbitrarily. If
not knowledge itself, but external coincidences like the right
position in the right knowledge processing organisation at the right
time define what is knowledge then, one might say, knowledge becomes a
pray of pure subjectivity. Whoever claims loudest and most convincible
to know commands knowledge. Ce la condition post-moderne.

This problem is insofar self-referential in this context as it
concerns the debates on how specialized knowledge production, if it is
fundamentally detached from demand, should be remunerated. Of course,
one might ask: should it be remunerated at all if it is so arbitrarily
that all criteria for its evaluation are lost? But if society decides
after all to go on solving highly sepcialized problems - may be for
completely different reasons: purchasing power for instance of
otherwise incomeless knowledge producers - then it seems hard pressed
not to do so on the base of conceptions like "equality", "justice",
"solidarity" etc. These conceptions are knowledge products themselves
and thus subject to postmodern arbitrarity. To process them and use
them as the base of distribution orders under postmodern conditions
might pose more problems than can be solved.

For this reason we argued in the beginning of our considerations to
regard proposed "solutions" for the problems brought up by the
differentiations of knowledge production functionally, i.e. in regard
to their ability to somehow "lastingly" bridge the various gaps
between supply and demand in knowledge production.

By doing so, we found that these "solutions" with which society so far
reacted to these gaps themselves contributed to widen them. We
conclude from this that supply and demand in specialized knowledge
production is per se not lastingly correletable. Therefore, if society
wishes to go on solving other than common problems it has to accept
that it can not do so in regard to any conceivable demand, i.e. a
demand that could somehow cover the costs of knowledge production.

Basic Income
============

Once society has accepted this fact, it seems only one step away from
radically detaching the coverage of costs of specialized knowledge
production from these activities themselves by providing at least
basic means for them regardless and unconditionally. One possibility
to do so might be a Basic Income.

Lets now consider in this regard the functionality of a Basic Income.

1.   Basic Income in its original idea is not exclusive, which means
     it does not include some beneficiary and exclude others. It thus
     can not form any kind of monopoly of what ever is done and
     created under its auspices. By itself it will not stabilize one
     kind of knowledge production more than any other and it will not
     promote or value one state of knowledge over any other. Basic
     Income in this regard seems to apply to and also seems to supply
     the vast plurality of postmodern knowledge production. By evenly
     distributing the chances for following the specialization of
     knowledge to wherever it leads to, it does not per se restrict
     the immanent logic of specialized knowledge production.

2.   Basic Income however is, as the word indicates, only a basic
     income meant to supply basic subsistence for knowledge producers
     to live on. In its original form it does not supply means for
     more costly knowledge production, for example for machinery,
     computers, scientific instruments and else. It thus will not
     succeed to detach knowledge production radically from the demand
     for it. It can, at best, provide just a basis on which some less
     demanded branches of this production can proceed to some degree
     without being harassed by permanent market fluctuations.

3.   Basic Income is itself a product of knowledge production. It thus
     is subject to the same "immanent logic" of differentiation and
     specialization that, as we said, all knowledge products are
     afflicted with. Basic Income therefore will only have a chance to
     help solving society's problems if implemented as flexible and
     undogmatic as possible - in order to be able to react to the
     consequences it inevitably will entail.


_________________________________
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Organization: http://www.oekonux.de/projekt/
Contact: projekt oekonux.de



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