The power of knowledge

Each country will need its own recipe and diagnosis to become a power center of knowledge, writes Dr Bhaskar Dasgupta.

(Continued from the previous article)

Last week we talked about what makes great knowledge powers and we noted that it is due to six main reasons. A strong top down sponsorship of arts and sciences; respect for scientists and artists; a basic minimum number of artists and scientists who congregate together; having the proper infrastructure needed to support knowledge generation; presence of capital to convert ideas into action and finally, the freedom of speech, individual liberty and ability to research almost anything that their minds take them to.

We ended last week’s column by giving a teaser on how to take this forward, how India and China can become knowledge powers? What can the USA do to safeguard its current lead? What can the UK do to restore its flagging powers? What can countries like Indonesia, South Africa, Mexico and Brazil do to become knowledge powers?

One thing which modern governments are very good at, is to establish committees, commissions, inquiries, expert councils or what have you, to come up with reports and tomes to advise the governments on public policy. The select group of developed or developing country governments, who are concerned about the future, have all established these worthy groupings and there are more reports floating around than all the universities of this world. Most of the democratic countries in the world are pretty well concerned about the future. By their very nature, liberal democracies have to do something about their soft powers, governance, security, economy, unlike despotic and autocratic countries where the leaders are solely concerned with their power and their Swiss bank accounts.

While researching this column, I came across a bewildering array of reports by and for the UK and USA. I am talking about substantive reports, as not one of them was less than 100 pages. Some were high level; several were industry specific, while others were specific to a sector, geography, race, ethnic origin, gender, etc. For example, there are reports on the competitive position of the USA over the next five, ten and fifty years. There are reports on the future competitiveness of the financial sector in the United Kingdom.

Reports are available on London as a financial centre and the UK as a medical research centre. One can find reports on the future of Silicon Valley as a centre of research and excellence for IT and the Thames Valley as a centre for motor racing research, development and testing. I found reports on increasing the output of university level Greek and Latin research papers and others on increasing the ability of Caribbean origin students in the UK to get more A Levels. Quango’s, research bodies and various institutes are prolific in producing reports of various shapes and sizes. Not content with that, the supranational and multinational institutions such as the World Bank, IMF, and United Nations are themselves responsible for a goodly chunk of electronic space for their reports.

If one wanted to plough through all these reports, I am afraid it would require several lifetimes, I only managed to skim through them. It is much easier to look at various countries through the guidelines/reasons which I have mentioned above rather than work through all these reports. In any case, it would be easier to compare and contrast across the ages and countries based upon this framework.

Let us start with the two countries which are said to be future knowledge powers, namely China and India. While these two countries are frequently lumped together by analysts, it behoves us to look at them separately. China has sponsorship of arts and sciences, respect for scientists; teachers and artisans are present (thank Confucius for that); there are respectable centres of research and lots of scientists – not least the droves of Chinese students who have come back to China after higher studies abroad; infrastructure is not as good as it could be, but still is a lot better compared to some other countries. Where it falls short is in the ability to translate ideas into action through proper deployment of capital and the concept of freedom of speech and individual rights.

China’s financial system is, at this moment, a rental economy, it relies on basic and fundamental research being done elsewhere and the ability to copy designs and take them into production at a vastly lower cost. Concepts such as private equity, venture capital, small caps stock exchange, presence of state development corporations, specialised government owned investment funds are either missing or minimal. I expect another 5-7 years before this sort of structure is relatively embedded within the Chinese economy.