Blue Collar Rocket Science

The first weekly reflection paper for the class I’m taking this quarter in the Master of Communication in Digital Media program. The class is Emerging Markets in Digital Media, taught by Anita Verna Crofts, Director of Communication and Outreach for the Global Health Leadership Program.

In his book “The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It,” Paul Collier presents the arguments he and his students have developed from years of statistical research, but for the most part leaves out the statistics. This is a popular book, not a tome for wonks, and the way its theses come across to a non-expert reader simultaneously as both small revelations and simple common sense recalls Jared Diamond’s sweeping look at history, “Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.” The difference is in scale and conclusion. Collier is looking at problems that have here-and-now effects not just on poor countries but all of us, and proposing solutions to them.

In Collier’s model, there are four “traps” that desperately impoverished countries fall into: conflict, natural resources, landlocked with bad neighbors, and bad governance in a small country. As a data-based pragmatist, he doesn’t offer single solutions to escaping these traps. For example, he recognizes that democracy can provide solutions to bad governance, pointing out that countries such as China can improve governance without democracy, and countries such as Nigeria can have democracies that produce poor governance.

I find the natural resource trap perhaps the most interesting, in particular the concept of “Dutch Disease.” In a country where exporting a single natural resource provides the bulk of GDP, other potential sources of export are made prohibitively expensive by an inflated currency value. He discusses how non-natural resource exports need not be physical but can also, as has been happening in India, be the knowledge and skills of an educated populace.

In the context of bad governance coupled with a single natural resource, Collier brings up a quantitative analysis of checks on political power, developed by unnamed “political scientists,” which consists of seventeen items. While the standard analysis weights each of these items equally, in Collier’s opinion the most important is the free press. He believes that with sufficient restraints on power, resource rich democracies can escape their governance traps and provide meaningful growth and improvement in standard of living.

From a digital media perspective, free press is an attractive starting point. Journalism and the media used to distribute it are so deeply intertwined as to have become nearly synonymous. The business models of large journalistic media companies in wealthy democracies may be collapsing due to the changed realities of digital media, but in countries where the free press hasn’t previously existed, the same factors would be a step forward, not a step back. One-to-many broadcast media that may be blocked, or which so often are the first things taken over in a coup, can be effectively replaced with many-to-one communications enabled through relatively low-cost cell phones and accompanying infrastructure. In an open communication marketplace, journalistic voices may arise and be difficult to silence.

In “resource trapped” countries, or landlocked countries where physical exportation is hampered by “bad neighbors,” the same cell networks could provide longer term solutions. At little cost, aid organizations based outside of target countries could establish online education programs that were freely available to all. Over the course of a few years, a better-educated generation of young people could emerge, ready not only to pursue new economic opportunities, but also equipped with critical reasoning skills allowing them to evaluate their countries’ political realities and find new models. And with digital networks, the transfer of funds or even the extension of credit, becomes available to anyone with a cell phone, adding velocity to stagnant economies. Ultimately, the two-way nature of digital communication could open up external markets for remote services offered by a trained populace.

By breaking with decades of received wisdom and doing statistical analysis on the patterns of failing countries Collier has identified that growth isn’t something greedy capitalist systems want, it’s a prerequisite to success in any economic system. Digital media has made information cheap and portable, and these two qualities make it possible to apply information-based solutions to seemingly intractable problems in the Bottom Billion countries.