Living On Thin Air

Today more and more of us make our livings from thin air – from our ideas and know-how. This is because knowledge is becoming the most creative force in the modern economy. In old capitalism, the critical assets were raw materials, land, labour and machinery. In the new capitalism, the raw materials are know-how, creativity, ingenuity and imagination. Our generation is the beneficiary of unprecedented flows of knowledge from science and education, and we are equipped in ever more powerful ways to share and combine our know-how through communications. As a result, the opportunities for growth are boundless. But this new economy is perilous as well as powerful. An economy driven by creativity should be more humane. Instead, most of us feel our economic lives are out of control, dominated by soulless financial markets and clouded by the insecurities bred by corporate downsizing.

Living on Thin Air is about how we can create an environment that is both innovative and inclusive. Our societies should be organised around the creation of knowledge capital and social capital, rather than being dominated by the power of financial capital. In this book I show how we can create communities of competition, in which we collaborate to compete in the global economy. The book sets out a new constitution for the new economy that shows why entrepreneurship will become a mass activity, companies will need to be structured as if they were brains, ownership must be broadly spread, and networks will become the main way of organising the knowledge economy. I argue for a radical overhaul of corporate and government institutions inherited from the industrial era which are ill-suited to the knowledge economy, including new approaches to measuring economic value, taxation and social entrepreneurship.