New Left Review I/227, January-February 1998

Desmond Ryan

The Thatcher Government’s Attack on Higher Education in Historical Perspective

Some ten millennia separated the agricultural revolution from the emergence of Britain as the First Industrial Nation. A mere two centuries has seen the supersession of the first industrial revolution by the second. This has not yet acquired a definitive title. However, if we may denominate an era by its staple, we see the Age of Corn giving way to the Age of Machinery, and then the Age of Machinery being succeeded by the Age of Information. A new staple does not eliminate the old, but, being more profitable, displaces it—even physically, to less mature economies. Just as industrial workers did not cease to eat while tending their machines or pondering their returns to investment, so the service workers of today still depend on the mechanical infrastructure which constructs their commodities and maintains their environment. But value in the economy is more and more derived from the quality and timeliness of information. Though food sustains it, and iron and plastic construct it, information now drives the world economy. No one doubts that they are living through an Information Revolution.

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