1. Useful Social Knowledge: some definitions 2. Propositional and Prescriptive Knowledge 3. The Role of Knowledge in Economic growth

4. Institutions, politics and the conditions for knowledge creation 5. Useful knowledge and changes in daily life 6. The diffusion and migration of knowledge 7. Is Knowledge “good? ” Ethical considerations. 11. Useful Social Knowledge: some definitions What is useful social knowledge? The term includes two elements, “social ” and “useful ” and I will deal with them in succession. What does it mean for an entire society to know something? The only sensible way of defining knowledge at a social level is as the union of all the sets of individual knowledge of the members of this society. It requires some simplifying assumptions – for instance, that we agree about who belongs and who does not belong to society. It also means that individual “knowledge ” can be defined abstracting from the degree of certainty that the individual has in the correctness of this knowledge (which I will discuss in more detail below). An immediate corollary of the definition is that the set of knowledge contains contradictory elements: it usually contains elements inconsistent with one another (some people still believe the earth is flat or that AIDS is not caused by the HIV virus). Another obvious characteristic is that the “truth ” of knowledge i