By Charles Leadbeater

Texere, 2000,

260 pages, $27.95

It’s not every writer that can get British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s endorsement on his book’s cover, but Charles Leadbeater is one of them. In The Weightless Society he gives us perspectives on the new, virtual ‘weightless’ economy gained from his position as an advisor to and position paper writer for Blair’s government. His book is a weave of his own views together with those of several other commentators (who are given full credit.) Leadbeater’s take on the workings of the new economy is unexceptional. He makes much of the fact that ignorance is a significant feature of the knowledge economy – ignorance on the part of users of the know-how embedded in the technology that underpins their activities. Intelligence, embodied in products, allows us to economize on scarce resources like attention and memory, but at the cost of making us dependent on specialists and experts of all kinds. But this surely has been the story since the discovery of fire and the invention of writing. Leadbeater is at his most interesting when he writes about the role of trust and community issues in the virtual economy, especially ownership of knowledge assets. He sees a mix of public and private property rights and ownership forms being essential: knowledge assets are held in a social contract among peers rather than in an economic contract between shareholders and managers. At the public policy level he suggests that Silicon Valley (and California in general) has been running its infrastructure – schools, universities, roads, housing – into the ground, and that its growth will not be sustainable without a more active public policy. Given current concerns about energy shortages, pollution and urban sprawl, these questions about the sustainability of growth have a broad application.