Leadership Quote by Bobby Scott

Bobby Scott’s line is the kind of policy shorthand that pretends to be descriptive while quietly issuing a set of marching orders. “Information and knowledge-based economy” sounds neutral, even inevitable, but it’s a political framing device: it shifts the story of prosperity away from factories, physical infrastructure, and organized labor and toward credentials, connectivity, and “human capital.” In a single breath, it licenses a familiar agenda: invest in education, reskill workers, modernize broadband, protect intellectual property, and treat innovation as the main engine of growth.

The subtext is where the heat is. If the economy is “knowledge-based,” then inequality can be recast as a skills gap rather than a power gap. Wages stagnate? Maybe people need more training. Jobs move overseas? Maybe workers need STEM. That framing can be earnest, but it also conveniently downplays corporate consolidation, weakened labor protections, and the fact that plenty of essential work remains stubbornly material: caregiving, logistics, construction, food production. Even in tech, “knowledge” is often extracted from crowds, users, and low-paid contractors, then packaged as proprietary value.

Contextually, Scott’s rhetoric sits in a long late-20th/early-21st century bipartisan groove: globalization accelerates, the internet reorganizes whole industries, and policymakers look for a story that fits both optimism about innovation and anxiety about displacement. The phrase works because it sounds future-facing without naming winners and losers. It’s a soft sell for hard choices, dressing economic transformation in the reassuring language of progress.