EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Ignorance is Strength

Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler

EconStor Preprints from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics

Abstract: Colin Harrison's novel The Finder (2008) uncovers the hidden hierarchy of differential information. We live in a knowledge economy, or so they say. And in the world of finance, knowledge is power: the power to buy assets before their price appreciates. This knowledge-as-power, though, is profitable only when exclusive. Common knowledge – no matter how sophisticated and complex – is never profitable. Only differential knowledge – i.e., knowledge that is unavailable to others or superior to what they have – can yield a ‘return’. This differential prerequisite explains why every entity in the pyramid of financial information – whether a person or an organization – has no more than a partial vista, with the remaining view blurred by enforced opaqueness and power-backed misinformation. The different vistas are also deeply formative. Individual ‘actors’ may feel empowered by what they know, but in practice, what they know serves to frame their thoughts and direct their actions – usually without them ever knowing it. Even those at the very top – indeed, especially those at the very top – are slaves to their knowledge, however superior.

Keywords: finance; differential information; literature; power (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D8 P16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/232294/1/2 ... e_is_strength_rn.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:esprep:232294

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in EconStor Preprints from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (econstor@zbw-workspace.eu).

 
Page updated 2024-12-28
Handle: RePEc:zbw:esprep:232294