….if the standard economics about knowledge diffusion is correct, and if this paper is correct about how access accelerates development, then a logical prediction is that we’re about to see the Mother of all economic booms. Back 30 years when I first started to study politics and economics the big question was how should we alter the world economy so as to aid the poor?: …give them access to the accumulated human knowledge and then get out of the way as they do it for themselves.

The great economic story of the past few decades has been how this neoliberal globalisation stuff has brought several billion poor people into the global economy. This has benefited us, in the goods that they have been producing, and it’s most certainly benefited them as this has also led to the greatest reduction in human poverty in the entire history of our species. Many are currently gloomy about economic prospects going forward and yet we’re really only just at the beginning of the effects of a revolutionary technology, the smartphone.

It’s long been known that the simple provision of a communications network adds substantially to economic growth. One result is that, in a country without a landline telephone network, for every 10% of the population that gains access to a mobile phone (just a regular, 2G, feature phone) then GDP growth rises by 0.5%. That’s 0.5% of GDP, not just that the extant growth rate rises by 0.5%. We would expect that sort of thing to continue with smartphones and the telecoms consultancies do tend to assume that sort of thing.

However, there’s now reason to believe that the smartphone is going to accelerate matters, not just continue at the same rate. It’s from this paper which Mike Munger has pointed us towards:….

Another way of putting this is that this paper is looking at the effect of the diffusion of knowledge upon growth: and access to things like Wikipedia is most certainly equivalent to the diffusion of knowledge….

And if the standard economics about knowledge diffusion is correct, and if this paper is correct about how access accelerates development, then a logical prediction is that we’re about to see the Mother of all economic booms. Back 30 years when I first started to study politics and economics the big question was how should we alter the world economy so as to aid the poor? And we might now be on the verge of an answer that really works: give them access to the accumulated human knowledge and then get out of the way as they do it for themselves.

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