Introduction

This book is an attempt to map the area where two of the more significant legacies of the 20th century combine. The second industrial revolution ushered in the service economy, in which people sat around producing nothing at all – or at least nothing that you could eat, or keep warm in – and the most abstract service of all was the financial services industry, the whole basis of which was an abstraction called money. As the service economy developed it became clear that a second abstraction – information, or knowledge – was the fuel on which it ran, and this led to the idea of the knowledge economy.