Machlup defined knowledge workers by transmission rather than original creation

Evidence

In measuring the flows of information, Machlup’s emphasis was not on invention or the creation of new knowledge but on the communication of existing knowledge. As he put it, “the ‘knowledge-producing’ occupations include all workers engaged in communication or in any other kind of endeavor related to knowledge transmission: analyzers, interpreters, processors, transformers and transporters of knowledge, as well as original creators.” In this sense, apparent craftspeople like lithographers and typesetters were “knowledge producers” or, as he called them elsewhere, “brain workers.” In Machlup’s model, new knowledge is appended almost as an afterthought. The emphasis is on the extension of the network or the system of knowledge transmission rather than the conditions for knowledge creation. His resistance to strong IP laws becomes legible in this light. The point was not to protect knowledge for its initial producer but to expand its use and circulation in the aggregate. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 188

Categorization

• XREF: Explains the internal logic connecting Machlup’s anti-strong-IP stance (earlier chapter material on patents) to his knowledge-economy framework — a thread worth tracing across chapters. — connects to: Machlup’s knowledge-economy model replaced labor value with information exchange — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 189
• DEEPTHINKING: The insight that a neoliberal knowledge framework centers transmission over creation, and that anti-IP follows from valuing circulation over proprietary ownership of ideas, resists the crude stereotype that neoliberalism is simply about strong property rights.