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Category Archives: Technology

How to become a feudal lord with hundreds of servants for $99

By William Easterly | Published July 22, 2010

Our image of a medieval king is of somebody with hundreds of servants waiting upon His Majesty. Today, for $99, you commoners can get a much larger and better group waiting upon you. You will even have dead servants working for you – (1) Sumerians from 3000 BC (2) Babylonians from 2000 BC, (3) Egyptians from 1850 BC (4) Indians from 500 BC, (5) 7th century BC Romans, (6) 18th century Austrian musicians, (7) a…

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Was the poverty of Africa determined in 1000 BC?

By William Easterly | Published July 15, 2010

The usual development conversation about determinants of per capita income revolves around modern choices of institutions or economic policies. But what if history is the main determinant of development today?

A paper by Diego Comin, Erick Gong, and myself was just published in the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics. We collected crude but informative data on the state of technology in various parts of the world in 1000 BC, 0 AD, and 1500 AD.

1500…

Also posted in Academic research | Tagged , | 67 Comments

The Androids are coming, is aid ready?

By Guest Blogger | Published July 6, 2010

This post is the second in a series by Dennis Whittle. Dennis is the CEO of GlobalGiving, an international marketplace for philanthropy.

In my last post, I argued that the “operating system” used by the current international aid agencies is stuck using IBM punch cards while the rest of the world has moved on to cell phones, laptops, and iPhones.

In the old system, you had to type programs into a stack of hundreds…

Also posted in Big ideas/ the secret to development is... | Tagged , | 8 Comments

Is aid stuck using IBM punch cards?

By Guest Blogger | Published June 29, 2010

This post was written by Dennis Whittle. Dennis is the CEO of GlobalGiving, an international marketplace for philanthropy.

When I went to college in the late 1970s we used punch cards like the one pictured here to put information into the (mainframe) computer. Over the next thirty years, competition in computer technology led to rapid innovation. Over those same thirty years, the aid industry followed a decidedly different pattern of development.

In the early 1980s,…

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How the development of technology averts Shakespearean tragedies

By William Easterly | Published June 24, 2010
  1. Juliet texts Romeo: Going 2 play dead, LOL!
  2. Huff Post unearths email incriminating Iago after 24/7 coverage of Desdemona-cheating-on-Othello rumors
  3. Hamlet gets treatment for depression, starts blog “Rotten in the State of Denmark”
  4. Brutus orchestrates Twitter campaign to overthrow Julius Caesar
  5. MacBeth double-checks Facebook page of Three Witches, comments: “no way I’m basing career decisions on somebody that twisted”
7 Comments

Touristiness

By William Easterly | Published May 31, 2010

This map of how popular different tourist places are was generated by an Estonian programmer using the number of photo uploads to a popular site. Yellow is the most touristy, followed by red, blue is not very touristy, but grey is nowheresville.

I am a little suspicious about the methodology after I saw Toledo, Ohio show up pretty yellow. However, otherwise the map seems plausible. Coasts and mountains show up about as much…

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Scratch and win for authentic malaria drugs

By Laura Freschi | Published May 18, 2010

Here’s a problem most people in rich countries don’t often have to deal with: wondering whether the drugs you’ve just picked up from your local pharmacy will kill you, save your life, or give you just enough active ingredients to create a new drug-resistant strain of an otherwise curable disease.

Counterfeiting does happen in rich countries, but more prevalently with “lifestyle drugs” like Viagra or allergy meds. Poor countries often have thriving counterfeit markets…

Also posted in Global health | Tagged , | 16 Comments

Mysteries of technological miracles

By William Easterly | Published May 6, 2010

UPDATE 11 43 am May 7: on something else on which I had been procrastinating forever: my iPad just made me a dentist appointment.

I just did a tech upgrade and my productivity has quintupled. And I don’t know why. Even the word “upgrade” is in doubt. Typing is more awkward. I make typos. I can’t plug in my camera. Some graphics that worked with my oldntechnology no longer work. The screen is smaller. Yet…

13 Comments

Time for toilet deregulation?

By William Easterly | Published April 16, 2010

UPDATE 10:34AM, 4/16 SEE END OF POST

Right now, India has more cell phones than toilets. That’s the headline buzzing over the wires today, thanks to the latest phones-to-toilets ratio released by the United Nations. It’s certainly a dramatic factoid. But it’s not just true of India’s 1.2 billion-strong population — this lopsided statistic is true around the globe, as well.

This is from the Change.org Global Poverty blog. The most obvious explanation:

And

…

Also posted in Big ideas/ the secret to development is..., Entrepreneurship | Tagged , , , , | 17 Comments

This device WILL change the world

By William Easterly | Published April 6, 2010

No, no, no, not THAT one!

I meant the one below:

It’s going to be a long while before very many poor people have iPads, but there is already one TV for every 4 people in the world.  I remember being in a remote village in Ghana with 30 people crowded around a TV set, so 1 in 4 implies a VERY big reach for TV already. In the words of…

Also posted in Academic research, Global health | Tagged , , | 21 Comments