People have been using the term knowledge economy for decades now, dating back to Peter Drucker and Alvin Toffler when they forecast the emergence of knowledge as the most important resource in all of industry. It seems these days to be a synonym for all-intellectual work: engineers, designers, market researchers, intellectual property attorneys, executives, futurists, and other people with what I call “laptop tan.” Thus, when people imagine a transition to a knowledge economy, it’s like they think about a day when 80% of high school graduates are all geniuses in theoretical calculus and chemistry, moving swiftly to college, then grad school, finally landing in the R&D product design lab of some company that innovates in the West while somebody in the East is getting sweaty.
This is an amazingly limited view. Rarely do I hear people associate knowledge economy with making things. Manufacturing, with its greasy overalls, its calloused hands, its physical exertion, all too rarely is seen as the repository of critical knowledge that we lose at our absolute peril. Consider then, one of the most beautiful films I have personally witnessed, Note by Note: The Making of the Steinway L1037, which is now available for streaming on Netflix. This documentary is a love poem to fine craftsmanship, showing in stage by meticulous stage how the artisans of the Steinway & Sons piano company make their nine-foot concert pianos. In each step, every person who touches wire and wood is the custodian of decades of hard-won knowledge about how a world-class piano is made. Men and women from the United States, Mexico, Croatia and many other nations each bring their own approach to hammering, chiseling, bending, shaping and tuning. Their work cannot possibly be replaced by machines, and while training can get new hires to go through the motions, the film points out that “only time can make you good at your job.”
When we speak of talent crunch, we speak of a global competition for cardiologists and chemical engineers, sure. But the forgotten aspect of the transition is in the unglossy, unhip industrial zone of Long Island City, New York, where years of knowledge are sown into the hands of men and women who did not receive their ticket to the knowledge economy through expensive, debt-laden university credentials. They were earned the only way possible, through strenuous, demanding, meticulous practice of a craft. Day after day, people came to a factory where jobs were not outsourced to the lowest-bidding shop at which workers can’t go to the restrooms when they feel like it. They brought their brothers and cousins to work along side them and pass along what they already knew. Real value was created. That is a knowledge economy.
It is not assured that this tradition will be passed on. The executives from Steinway note that gone are the days when every home needed a piano. They list all of the competing piano companies in New York, each disappearing with shifts in style, emergence of new technologies, migration of manufacturing to far off places. Dwindling companies employ fewer workers to deepen their craft.
If we who speak of innovation and economic development do not focus people’s attention on this potential loss, what is the future of our economies? What will our countries look like if we mistake work in front of laptops for the only repositories of knowledge worth encouraging and preserving?
Listen to a Steinway Concert Grand piano while you think it over.