The Information Economy: Definition and Measurement

Porat's nine-volume study for the US Department of Commerce was the first rigorous attempt to measure how much of the American economy was already devoted to the production, processing, and distribution of information. Writing his Stanford dissertation in the mid-1970s, he developed a classification system that divided economic activity into primary information sectors (computing, telecommunications, publishing), secondary information sectors (information activities within non-information firms), and a residual goods-producing sector. His conclusion — that roughly half the US workforce was already engaged in information work — predated and directly influenced the "information society" discourse of the 1980s and 1990s, from Bell to Castells. The study remains a landmark in economic measurement methodology, showing that the transition to an information economy was well underway decades before the internet made it visible to everyone.