watersheds. Each sensor reports daily snowpack, temperature, and precipitation data to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. • Almost one-half of the inhabitants of the Northwest have access to cable television, with 1.5 million'homes in 809 communities receiving cable. • The Western Library Network, a computer · system which catalogs over 3.5 million items housed in northwest libraries, supports 210 online users who make 700,000 database inquiries each month. The database adds 400,000 new titles each year. • At least 73 daily newspapers are published in the Northwest, along with over 270 periodicals scattered through the five states. We take most of these systems for granted, though we rely on them both directly and indirectly every day. Market research, political polls, environmental ~mpact statements, public hearings on local issues, the Freedom of Information Act, the pleth?ra of popular and scholarly periodicals, the videotape and compact disk booms are part of our economy and are vehicles for the information which shapes our economic decisions. ·Yet we continue to lack a vocabulary or set of measuring tools to analyze this component of our economy. "What's the difference between intellectual assets and labor assets? To date, economic theory has made little effort to distinguish between intellectual services and physical labor services ..." Forrest Woody Horton asks us to "treat information as a real economic good," to recognize that we have left an era of lab~r as a fundamental economic good, and of capital as a fundamental economic good, and are entering one where intellectual skill becomes the critical . ~ommodity and force in shaping productivity. ·What is the Northwest's "capacity to produce and distribute knowledge-that is, to develop ·its huma~ resource?" Are we focusing public and expert attention on developing the region's intellectual and human resources? How would we begin to sketch an analysis of the Northwest's particular strengths and weaknesses? !he . ~egion c~ntains a number of great umversihes and pnvate enterprises with hundreds of thousands of skilled "knowledge workers." We have seen that over half of the northwest'$ Page 8 RAIN Fall/Winter 1986 workers are in the information "business," and must marvel at the sheer quantity of experience, wisdom, and value that represents. With only 3.5% of the nation's population, the Northwest shelters 5.5% of its.software firms (but only 2.6% of its computer and chip makers). We need to recognize the measurable economic importance of the region's intellectual resource. Thousands of northwesterners sell their expertise outside of the region: planners in Saudi ~rabia, agronomists in Nigeria, language teachers m Japan, teachers in California, authors in New '! o~k. How much of the world is craving knowledge m J.ust the areas of our region's greatest strengths; agriculture, forestry, energy extraction, and participatory government! As the recent Information Highways volume :evealed, the Northwest has developed a sound mfrastructure for the transmission of print, digital, and other information media. Microwave networks sat~llite links, transportation networks, and th~ basic soundness of our telephone systems provide the basis for a limitless array of information transactions. At the same time, much of our potential to develop an "information economy" remains unf~l~illed. Washington State University lacks suf~icient fu~ds to complete the on:.line cataloging of its very important library; the Montana Health Sciences Net~ork recent~y lost funding for a simple 1-800 phone lme to permit Montanans access to basic h~alth care information; the Idaho Regional ~ibrary Network lost its funding in July 1985. In a time of scarce resources, public agencies have ~lected .to place a lower priority on various mformahon services: education, libraries, and the communications infrastructure. The Northwest's corporate sector has also failed to respond to the basic economic tr~nds of the day. At the same time, some institutions are discovering that they can market their information products on the commercial market: Columbia Information Systems sells access to its on-line database of consu?'er behavior to banks throughout Oregon and Washington; the National Oceanic and ~tmosp~eric Administration sells a variety of mformahon services including satellite data oceanographic measures, climatological data, and many publications; Kaiser-Permanente Health Research Foundation sells access to its database of subscriber health data. When the region was settled by Europeans, at the dawn of the communications age, few people completed secondary school, and a handful attended college. A century later, over 75% of
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