In measuring the flows of information, Machlup’s emphasis was not on invention or the creation of new knowledge but on the communication of existing knowledge. As he put it, “the ‘knowledge-producing’ occupations include all workers engaged in communication or in any other kind of endeavor related to knowledge transmission: analyzers, interpreters, processors, transformers and transporters of knowledge, as well as original creators.” In this sense, apparent craftspeople like lithographers and typesetters were “knowledge producers” or, as he called them elsewhere, “brain workers.” In Machlup’s model, new knowledge is appended almost as an afterthought. The emphasis is on the extension of the network or the system of knowledge transmission rather than the conditions for knowledge creation. His resistance to strong IP laws becomes legible in this light. The point was not to protect knowledge for its initial producer but to expand its use and circulation in the aggregate.

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 188