Knowledge has two purposes. The first and foremost purpose of knowledge is its application, to make things better for people, products, government and services. The second purpose is that knowledge is a foundation for the growth of knowledge. The latter is subservient to the former. Knowledge, without application, is little more than the very highest class parlor game.

The term Knowledge Worker is meant to describe an occupation in a Post-Industrial economy in which knowledge is of the higher value than any mere product or commodity. The Knowledge Worker is the most highly paid of all workers because he knows stuff. That is probably a fair assessment, but there is nothing new about that, and it will continue.

Folks that paint a picture of a Post-Industrial America filled with knowledge workers seem to fail to understand the fundamental fact that knowledge is about things, how to do things and how to make things. The things are products, government and services. There are sciences that are pure, unified field theory and theoretical mathematics for instance. Without a strong flow of economic uplift, these are hobbies.

What we have in rosy projections of a Post-Industrial Knowledge Worker nirvana is the unholy wedding of the wet dreams of academics with the propagandists of corporate globalization. Corporations have made use of the dreamy prognostications of academic utopians to paint a deceptive picture of the outcome of the de-industrialization of America. In order to understand what the prospects are for a Knowledge based economy, we should examine how knowledge is currently packaged and sold and, very important, how portable it is.

How do you package and market knowledge? Universities have been packaging and marketing knowledge for some time. A substantial subset of the known knowledge will cost you around $80,000 and about four years. We can’t all be University professors.

Lawyers have found a far more tractable solution for dispensing knowledge in incremental bits, smaller than a four year course of study. Doctors do it, they charge by the procedure. Consultants of all stripes charge by the hour or by the procedure. Politicians, well, they charge by the election.

People who do not have knowledge hire Knowledge Workers to do the things that they can’t do. On an individual basis this makes sense. If you don’t know how to build a car, you pay someone else to do it. If you don’t know how to weave cloth or sew a pair of pants, you pay someone to do it. One more time, if you can’t build a computer yourself, you pay someone to do it. Virtually all work is knowledge work. An experienced ditch digger can dig a better ditch than an amateur.

The portability of knowledge is important. If it is portable, the work will go to the lowest bidder in the global economy. Now, can you imagine anything more portable than knowledge? In the past it took a couple of books, a couple of teachers and a circus tent to move knowledge. Now it takes a web site.

The only thing that ties down a Knowledge Worker to a specific place is physical customer contact. Doctors now consult with patients over the internet. The only reason lawyers are physically in courtrooms is that the law requires it. The only reason accountants are in corporate offices is that the CEOs sometimes like to chat with them. A seamstress could be in another country except for the taking of measurements. A ditch digger must pretty much be on the site of the ditch, if not actually in it.

In general, the more analytical and abstract a job is, the more valuable it is, and the more portable it is. So in truth, the work of a Knowledge Worker is the most portable work of all, and therefore the most susceptible to offshore competition. If anything, the global economy will reduce the number of Knowledge Workers in America in the short to middle term, more than any other type of occupation. Manufacturing jobs, though abstract and portable, take much more capital and logistics to outsource.

If government can’t see it, current Knowledge Workers can. Only 35% of engineers and doctors in America currently recommend their profession to their children. If you are an accountant, an engineer, a mathematician, doctor or and investment banker, you should be very, very concerned.

The corporate vision of Knowledge Worker is a fantasy. Somehow, the American Knowledge Worker will have some specialized knowledge about something that the rest of the world does not, and cannot know. In other words, we Americans will possess some process of dealing with some "thing" that no one else in the world will know about, and it will take every one of us that is now a professional Knowledge Worker in another field that will soon be outsourced, to perform this task for the undeveloped world.

Literally, what is envisioned so far as a Knowledge Worker is someone who understands American and foreign import and export law, corporate accounting, international currency trading, international marketing and secure communications technology. By this definition, currently, less than one percent of the American population are Knowledge Workers. Unfortunately, the people in the markets to whom we intend to sell this knowledge to know how to do it just as well as we do. The only advantage we have over them, for the less than one percent of us that know international finance and logistics, is that we control the monetary standard for the world. And the reason we control the monetary standard for the world is the that we have the largest economy in the world, for now. If we don’t have it, the largest economy, no one will care what our Knowledge Workers know. Just as ten years ago, no one cared what Indian or Chinese Knowledge Workers knew.

In order to control our destiny, none of us can afford to indulge in the fantasy of the academic corporate orgy of reassurance about the preeminence of corporate global Knowledge Workers. If we give away the work that sustains the economy that supports real domestic Knowledge Workers, no one will even care that we ever existed except as an historical footnote. Literally, if our economy falls to par with the rest of the world, through outsourcing our knowledge work, we will lose our preeminence in what has been the most dear to us, creativity and entrepreneurship. We will lose it because our best minds will no longer study science or engineering and medicine, there being no advantage to do so.

The most important aspect of our successful economy is relatively higher wages across the board. The engine of creativity is fueled by prosperity. Innovation is a luxury. Knowledge is derived and nurtured with abundance, as it has been since the Pharaohs. Both innovation and invention are hard work, but neither happens when there is no market for the results. If no one could have afforded electricity, would there ever have been a light bulb?

The whole concept of a Knowledge Worker assumes facts that are not in evidence. It assumes that the world will be a customer for innovation and invention when the whole thrust of globaliztion is a global economy in which people are paid less for a unit of work. Those people who are paid less will be able to afford fewer light bulbs. So the logical outcome is that the world will consume fewer light bulbs, making the creativity that made light bulbs less important.

Now if on the other hand, the objective of global corporations is the raising of wages worldwide, more people will be able to buy light bulbs and Knowledge Workers will remain in demand. See Is globalization creating global growth?

The corporate Knowledge Workers might be the last vestige of the middle class, but that too will pass.