The Social Dimension of the Learning Economy

This paper is a slightly revised version of Bengt-Åke Lundvall's Inaugural Lecture, the 10th of November at Department for Business Studies, Aalborg University. The general message is that the growing frequency of so-called paradoxes in economic theory and of unsolved socioeconomic problems reflects that neither economic theory nor policy has been adapted to the fact that we have entered a new phase: the 'Learning Economy'. It is shown that in the learning economy the capacity to learn increasingly determines the relative position of individuals, firms and national systems. The growing polarisation in the OECD-labour markets is explained by the increasing importance of learning and the acceleration in the rate of change. Finally, it is argued that the learning economy will not be sustainable if these tendencies are not countered by a New New Deal which puts the focus on the distribution of capabilities to learn