We Information Agers Are Hardly All Alike
In his eagerness to savage the leaders of the high-tech industry, Gary Chapman (“Time to Cast Aside Political Apathy in Favor of Creating a New Vision for America,” Innovation, Aug. 19) has made the common mistake of the fanatic and confused those he hates with everyone involved in the Information Age economy.
Whether or not “most leaders of the high-tech industry would look comically out of place in a poor African American church,” and whether or not “most high-tech industry leaders can only dream about having the gravitas that Bob Dole acquired long ago as a young war hero,” most of those who are actually moving this country from the Industrial to the Information Age do not believe for a minute that the U.S. “should be reduced to merely managing a consumer economy.” The moving force in the transition to the new economy is in fact a new constituency made up of knowledge workers. These are people who use computers on the job, decide for themselves the best way to do their jobs, and work in teams with other knowledge workers to solve problems.
In the first survey ever done to identify them, the results of which will be made public in the next few weeks, Institute for the New California has discovered that knowledge workers already make up a quarter of the California work force. There are now more knowledge workers in California than there are blue-collar workers, and their numbers continue to grow.
A majority of knowledge workers consider themselves political moderates rather than liberals or conservatives, and they are more likely than Californians as a whole to call themselves independents. Unlike conservatives, they believe government is important; but their own experience with the new technology, and their own experience with working with others, has convinced them that government can do more with less, that government can reduce the size of its bureaucracy, or even eliminate it altogether, without reducing public services.
Whatever certain Silicon Valley leaders may believe, knowledge workers reject the notion that the market by itself can solve the problems facing this country. They do believe that there are certain areas of public policy in which it makes more sense to have government establish the rules within which the market can then achieve desirable results, rather than have government issue a mind-numbing set of regulations to control every facet of behavior.
Finally, knowledge workers are more likely than the rest of the electorate to believe that government does have a responsibility to give those who are on welfare or those who work for the minimum wage the training they need in the new technology, even if government has to pay for it.
Knowledge workers are the new constituency in American politics, and they will, as Ronald Brownstein suggested, “define the political order of the next century and the next economy.”
DUDLEY BUFFA
President, Institute for the New California
