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It is informed that knowledge has been at the heart of economic growth and the gradual rise in levels of social well-being since time immemorial. Economic historians point out that nowadays, disparities in the productivity and growth of different countries have far less to do with their abundance of natural resources than with the capacity to improve the quality of human capital and factors of production: in other words, to create new knowledge and ideas and incorporate them into equipment and people. It is opined that a distinction needs to be drawn between knowledge and information. Knowledge empowers its possessors with the capacity for intellectual or manual action. So it basically boils down to cognitive capacity. Information, on the other hand, takes the shape of structured and formatted data-sets that remain passive and inert until used by those with the knowledge needed to interpret and process them. The full meaning of this distinction becomes clear when one looks into the conditions governing the reproduction of knowledge and information.