Monday, June 08, 2009

From the archives - knowledge vs. insight

Something for our children to consider:

"Knowledge is one of the scarcest of all resources in any economy, and the insight distilled from knowledge is scarcer still."

-Thomas Sowell, p. 63, Basic Economics, A Citizen's Guide to the Economy

"Basic Economics" was written in 2000. This was back when Google was still taking off. I wonder if Thomas Sowell would phrase the thought above differently now. With Google knowledge isn't so scare. I do believe that insight and wisdom is still very scarce.


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Technorati tags: knowledge, insight, wisdom, Thomas, Sowell

3 comments:

Spunky said...

If you haven't read Thomas Friedman's book, The World is Flat, it is an insightful look at how Google transformed information.

Anonymous said...

Information and knowledge are not quite the same thing and wisdom is something else again.

See a post of mine about this topic at my blog.

http://proper-role-of-government.blogspot.com/2009/04/this-i-believe.html

Henry Cate said...

Spunky - I skimmed it awhile back, but had to return it to the library. It did have some interesting thoughts.

Michelle - Thanks for the link. You are right, information, knowledge and wisdom are different. I'd like lots of each, but wisdom is the most important.