OLPC and the world economic imbalance
Tuesday, December 25th, 2007In ways typical of his usual punditry, John C. Dvorak decides to bash the One Laptop Per Child project. He reaches into his bag of over-the-top comparisons and sly turns of phrase, and argues that the laptop project is just the rich West being guilted into doing something for poor Africans and choosing this totally inappropriate remedy.
The British pundit Bill Thompson answers Dvorak and pokes holes in his argument — and does a wonderful job of bringing a dose of reality into the conversation.
The argument isn’t the first one out there. The debate about the OLPC has been going on ever since Nicholas Negroponte started talking about the project. It’s been both praised and criticized on aspects ranging from its technology, its cost, its educational value, and every single other conceivable aspect of its existence.
The strongest argument, however, is not one based on the OLPC at all. While talking about a green computer for kids, we are really getting in the middle of a long-standing debate in the West about how to approach post-colonial Africa and other developing nations. Is it right for the West to patronize the developing nations? Should we leave them to figure things out for themselves, even if it takes a hundred years? As people living in industrialized nations we feel a strong sense of injustice: our life expectancies are reasonable, our purchasing power is providing us with an ever-growing material wealth, and we have risen from working to provide for sustenance to being able to hold meta-discussions about our societal goals — yet, we have done a lot of this by letting others remain in the dark as we took their natural resources and at times decimated their populations.
With the world’s wealth severely out of balance, the self-conscious West wants to find ways to help. It tries sending aid – food and clothing, technology and money – most often with no long-term benefit. With aid efforts coming and going without any noticeable impact, it’s not surprising that people like Dvorak grow weary of yet another way to ram an unasked-for gift down the throats of people who most definitely like food first, and green laptops later.
The world’s resources may be seen as a zero-sum game, and the West has been playing with the developing world as if the game was exactly that. It typically talks about help to the developing world as transfer of wealth in some way, be it food, medicine patents, or even free military help to deal with internal political conflicts. What the West fails to realize is that in order to truly solve the imbalance of wealth we would have to somehow radically re-allocate our resources. This means that the West has to become really, really poor relative to its current situation. If the Gross World Product is about $65,960,000,000,000 (that’s about $66 trillion), and there are about 6.6 billion people in the world, the average per-capita GDP should be about $10,000. That’s four times less than the per-capita GDP in the United States, less than third of the per-capita figure in France, Malaysia would have to shed nearly a third, and even folks in Mexico would have to sacrifice a little bit. I do not think that the world, and especially the West, is ready to accept that kind of a transition. Indeed, even if we wanted to re-balance the world in a less-egalitarian way and, say, created a 4-to-1 disparity between the richer and poorer, we would still have to bring the per-capita figures to $16,000 in the 30 to 40 different Western countries.
Assuming that there will never be political will in the West to voluntarily become poor in order to empower the developing world, the only solution is to think of economic growth for the developing nations as acquiring new abilities rather than simply receiving transfers from the rich parts of the world. This is where projects like the OLPC come in. With a relatively small investment from the West — mainly comprised of technical and organizational know-how required to put together the laptop, its software, and its manufacturers — the West creates a tool that may empower some creation of new wealth, and new prosperity, in the developing world. Education and other stimulants of the information economy have the power to create a set of people who will contribute to the world — and their local society — in ways that would not be possible if we were simply providing expendable food. If a million laptops are distributed, and 700,000 of them crash and burn, and a further 200,000 are stolen, that still leaves a hundred thousand kids who are exposed to the Internet, the information economy, computation, software development, hardware engineering… you name it, in some way or another. That knowledge is not priceless, but it will last a lot longer than temporary insufficiently-sized one-time wealth transfers from the ashamed West.
In 2002, the president of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, was speaking to the Oraganization of the Islamic Conference’s committee on Science and Technology. In his speech he pointed out the great difference in educational disparity between the entire Islamic world, and the West (he actually used the example of the entire Islamic world having only 430 universities, and the country of Japan alone having 1000). He urged his colleagues — other heads of state — to invest in higher education as a way of lifting the member nations out of the relative darkness, as he described the situation. He even declared a jihad “against illiteracy, poverty, backwardness and deprivation”.
Mr. Musharraf’s words are encouraging. That a leader of a nation deeply in the midst of poor, developing nations acknowledges at the highest level the need to encourage and develop education as the primary method for getting out of the economic imbalance indicates at least some understanding of these same forces of creating long-term prosperity. The knowledge and information economy stimulation can also occur via other means than building universities: with methods such as the little green laptops, which cost the West fairly little but provide the developing world with a platform to build their future.
Now we just have to hope that Mr. Musharraf and others like him continue to believe in this principle, and begin this investment in their future in earnest.