Misalignment Between Skills Discovered, Disseminated, and Deployed in the Knowledge Economy

The knowledge economy is a complex and dynamical system,where knowledge and skills are discovered through research,diffused via education,and deployed by industry.Dynamically aligning the supply of new knowledge with the demand for practical skills through education is critical for developing national innovation systems that maximize human flourishing.In this paper,we evaluate the complex alignment of skills across the knowledge economy by creating an integrated semantic model that neurally encodes invented,instructed,and instituted skills across three major datasets:research abstracts from the Web of Science,teaching syllabi from the Open Syllabus Project,and job advertisements from Burning Glass.Analyzing the high dimensional knowledge and skills space inscribed by these data,we draw critical insight about systemic misalignment between the diversity of skills supplied and demanded in the knowledge economy.Consistent with insights from economic geography,demand for skills from industry exhibits high entropy(diversity)at local,regional,and national levels,demonstrating dense complementarities between them at all levels of the economy.Consistent with the economics and sociology of innovation,we find low entropy in the invention of new knowledge and skills through research,as specialist researchers cluster within universities.We provide new evidence,however,for the low entropy of skills taught at local,regional,and national levels,illustrating a massive mismatch between diversity in skills supplied versus demanded.This misalignment is sustained by the spatial and institutional mismatch in the organization of education by researchers at the site of skill invention over use.Our findings suggestively trace the societal costs of tethering education to researchers with narrow knowledge rather than students with broad skill needs.

Global Challenges to Intellectual History： Regional Focus of Intellectual History in the West

The first part of the paper shows that in American and European academia, the field of intellectual history has continued to neglect the world outside of the West. The reasons for this Eurocentric bias are related to lasting hierarchies in the global landscape of historiography. To put it bluntly, Western scholars can afford to ignore historical approaches from other parts of the world, while the opposite is not the case. Whereas fields like subaltern studies have pointed at such problems, these hierarchies （and their historical roots ） have thus far hardly been considered in the debate about the future of intellectual history. In the second part, the paper outlines some important research agendas for the field of global intellectual history. For example, it argues that the transnational spread（ and local adaptation） of Eurocentric ideas since the 19th century remains insufficiently understood. The same is true for the changing facets of international hierarchies of knowledge, which have continued to influence historical scholarship around the world up until the present day.