The Fourth Economy: Inventing Western Civilization by Ron Davison

Author:Ron Davison
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2012-07-10T14:00:00+00:00

Life expectancy also rose, from forty-seven to seventy-seven years between 1900 and 2000.[223] No era in history had brought such dramatic increases in real income or such improvements in health.

Germany pioneered much of modern education. Kindergarten is one of the few German words we use that now sounds like English to us. Early in the 20th century, German universities were producing the world’s best knowledge workers. After World War I, the Allies could not even decode the patents they stole from the Germans and had to hire away German engineers and scientists in order to use them.

Germany’s educational system produced iconic philosophers and industrialists. Karl Marx proved history’s most persuasive critic of capitalism. Karl Benz, a graduate of Karlruhe Polytechnic School, invented the first car to be powered by an internal combustion engine, and founded what would be, by 1900, the world’s largest automobile company. Rudolf Diesel, graduate of Munich Polytechnic, invented the engine that bore his name. The British led innovation in the industrial economy, largely by such social inventions as patent law. The Germans were early leaders in the information economy, largely on the strength of innovations in education, specifically, pioneering the modern university. As with British patent laws, a person predicting the impact of this social invention would have seem crazy.

During the twelfth century, Cambridge, Oxford, Bologna, and Paris all had universities. These were different from what we know today, in that they were institutions designed to teach what was known. To be sure, there was problem solving (particularly as academia wrestled with the problems of law created by changes in states and their relationship to the church), but the general thrust of the university was less about creating new knowledge than passing along old wisdom.

The Enlightenment changed that. Enlightenment philosophers were intent on experimentation and tinkering. They were in search of principles that could describe swaths of phenomena and predict things that had not yet happened.

Wilhelm Humboldt– along with men like Ben Franklin who founded what was to become the University of Pennsylvania and Thomas Jefferson who founded the University of Virginia – was one of the leading inventors of the modern university. He is a big reason that so many of the innovators in thought and technology emerged from Germany in the late nineteenths and early twentieth centuries.

Wilhelm Humboldt was the equivalent of the Prussian ambassador to London when Nathan Rothschild was negotiating his loan with the King of Prussia. His intervention on behalf of the Rothschilds helped them to secure the loan that would be so instrumental in the creation of the international bond market. He was a philosopher and wrote a book that helped to establish linguistics as a field of study and to define semiotics. Linguistics and semiotics are probably the areas that best epitomize the problems of the information age—the question of how meaning is created and how it is conveyed through symbols. In a sense, Humboldt laid the foundation for the transition into the digital age, when reality was made virtual.

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