ABSTRACT
The author began to write about the shift to knowledge as the new key resource and as the creator of wealth and jobs in his/her 1949 book The New Society. The immensity of this shift is hardly fully realized as yet. From time immemorial the overwhelming majority of all people made their living working with their hands - and that was still true, as late as 1913 even in the most highly advanced country. By contrast, the shift to knowledge work and knowledge worker is a true discontinuity, a true break - and it creates both a new social condition and a new human condition. The political systems everywhere are, for instance, still based on the assumption of a preponderantly manual work force, and indeed on the assumption of a preponderantly rural work force - most extreme in Japan and France, but also still powerful in the US.
