Executive Summary

• The importance of "ownership" of specialized knowledge & skills
• Why decentralization of work (vs. the traditional hierarchical organization) is the future
• Why disruption and fluidity will be the norm for most sectors of the economy
• Why flexibility, innovation, and self-reliance will be the hallmarks of the successful post-capitalist worker

If you have not yet read Part I: We're Living Through a Rare Economic Transformation, available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

In Part I, we reviewed the basic structure of what author Peter Drucker termed the post-capitalist society, a knowledge economy based on a model of decentralized, perpetually innovating organizations.

In Part II, we ask: How do we turn these structural insights to our own advantage?

Since the membership of Peak Prosperity is highly advanced, much of this may strike you as self-evident.  If so, there is still value in fitting what we know and anticipate into a coherent structure, not just of the inevitable decline of the Status Quo, but of the evolution of a new social and economic order that is better able to meet the challenges currently being mismanaged by the Status Quo.

Structural Inequality

I want to start with the social-political-economic divide that is endemic to the knowledge economy: the widening gap between the class of knowledge workers, which Drucker understood would be the smaller of the two classes, and service workers.

In broad brush, those workers and enterprises engaged in sectors that generate most of the wealth creation will do much better financially than those engaged in low-margin sectors.  In the knowledge economy, those with high-level, specialized skills will create more value and thus be better compensated than those with generalized knowledge and/or lower-level skills.