Archive for August, 2010
In economic development, the micro-macro paradox refers to the observation that most projects and programs are reported as successes, but macro level indicators do not often reflect similar success. If USAID or some NGO is building a bunch of hospitals, training a bunch of workers and paving a bunch of roads, and these are all reported as successful individual projects, why don’t health indicators rise, productivity increase, and growth accelerate?
One of the most obvious explanations is that evaluation criteria for the micro level is inadequate. That is, those hospitals, workers and roads aren’t actually any better than before.1
A different dynamic seems to be at play in ICT4D, though. In contrast to the foreign aid macro literature, where aid’s effectiveness is brought into serious doubt2 , the ICT4D macro literature is fairly conclusive: more ICTs lead to higher growth. More mobiles, more growth.3 More broadband, more growth.4
However, at the micro level, the effectiveness of ICT4D is seriously questioned. Events like FailFaire have drawn attention to the on-the-ground realities that make successful ICT4D interventions so difficult. Among these issues are technical mishaps and social dynamics (such as trust, existing power structures, and simple lack of interest or buy-in).
So it seems that ICT4D has a micro-macro paradox, but it is the opposite of the foreign aid version: micro, ineffective; macro, effective. Why is this? Some might argue ICT4D is a field with better M&E; after all, the frank discussions that happen on blogs and at events like Failfaire seem to indicate a level of awareness that perhaps leads to good micro practices and therefore good macro results. This could be the case, but I actually highly doubt it.
More likely, I think, is that researchers and practitioners fall prey to a form of technological determinism. If you read the macro level ICT4D studies that derive growth from increased technological diffusion, you could be forgiven for believing that giving each child a laptop is a necessary and sufficient effort for development goals. Reasonable observers, of course, know that simply putting a phone in the pockets of more people will not magically lead to development – it’s about appropriate usage and an enabling environment.
Getting those right, however, is far from guaranteed, and I’m increasingly confident that ICT4D is successful not because of micro or macro initiatives, but mid-level, meso institutions and policies that mediate between the two extremes. But more on that soon.
- There are other possibilities suggested, for the record. [↩]
- Riddell’s “Does Foreign Aid Really Work?” provides a comprehensive examination of the question. [↩]
- Waverman, Meschi & Fuss 2005 (PDF) [↩]
- WSIS points to 170 studies suggesting this. [↩]
If, after our historically discontinuous examples of the paranoid style, we now take the long jump to the contemporary right wing, we find some rather important differences from the nineteenth-century movements. The spokesmen of those earlier movements felt that they stood for causes and personal types that were still in possession of their country—that they were fending off threats to a still established way of life. But the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.
No, not contemporary, but Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style of American Politics from 1964. More:
The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millenialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date fort the apocalypse. (“Time is running out,” said Welch in 1951. “Evidence is piling up on many sides and from many sources that October 1952 is the fatal month when Stalin will attack.”)
Compare to certain pundit’s obsession with historical analogy:
The higher paranoid scholarship is nothing if not coherent—in fact the paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world. It is nothing if not scholarly in technique. McCarthy’s 96-page pamphlet, McCarthyism contains no less than 313 footnote references, and Mr. Welch’s incredible assault on Eisenhower, The Politician, has one hundred pages of bibliography and notes. The entire right-wing movement of our time is a parade of experts, study groups, monographs, footnotes, and bibliographies. Sometimes the right-wing striving for scholarly depth and an inclusive world view has startling consequences: Mr. Welch, for example, has charged that the popularity of Arnold Toynbee’s historical work is the consequence of a plot on the part of Fabians, “Labour party bosses in England,” and various members of the Anglo-American “liberal establishment” to overshadow the much more truthful and illuminating work of Oswald Spengler.
We are told that we live in an information age, a knowledge economy, and a network society. And while these are useful shorthands for pointing towards certain trends, of course, information, knowledge and networks are nothing new to our age, economy and society.
One of the strongest explanations for the historical importance of information and communication technologies to economic dynamism is James Beniger’s Control Revolution which convincingly argues that ICTs were originally necessary not to an information economy of services, but an industrial economy of manufacturing.
The telegraph, and even more mundane innovations like tables, arose in response to a “crisis of control.” The most poignant example of this was how the speed at which trains operated made traditional communication and managerial strategies inadequate. Crashes were frequent until ICTs were developed to overcome the crisis through alerting distant switching stations and tracking repair statuses.
What, then, does the rise of ICTs in developing countries mean for industrialization?
Many people hope that the Indian model, where ICT created an enormous service industry, is replicable (this form of leapfrogging is famously the goal of Rwanda’s President Kagame). But as we strive to use ICTs for productive activities in the developing world, we would be remiss to ignore manufacturing – the sector that stands between agricultural societies and service-based ones. As China becomes increasingly sophisticated, we see the initial stages of poorer countries replacing them as the world’s factory floor. Increasing the productivity and efficiency of industry in the developing world will require ICTs, from cloud computing down to file management systems. While this will mean some service-based businesses providing ICT solutions, I think a potentially more productive change will come as the structure of the economies shift from primarily agricultural to significantly industrial. This, I think, could be one of the more promising roles for ICTs in development.
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