July 14, 2013 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are bringing their “can-do, failure-conquering, technology-enabled” tactics to the fight against global poverty, but they are wildly optimistic about what their gadgets can accomplish, says the cover article in Foreign Policy (July-August).
“All the technological transformation of the last 200 years hasn’t come close to wiping out global poverty,” write Charles Kenny and Justin Sandefur, fellows at the Center for Global Development.
They say some California moguls are spouting technological evangelism, bordering on utopianism, as in the books The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations, and Business, by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, and Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think, by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler. “The weak link between technology’s advance and global poverty reduction shouldn’t come as a surprise,” the authors say. “Most technologies were invented in the rich world to tackle rich-world problems.”
The article says tech boosters hand out prizes, awards, and money to “whiz bang projects that look great on a PowerPoint slide, but often crash and burn in the real world.”
It highlights the Soccket, a $99 soccer ball enclosing electronics that can power an LED light for three hours after it has been kicked around for 30 minutes, asking what advantage it has over a $10 solar-powered lamp that does not require any kicking.
The authors prescribe more testing of ideas and more work to create markets for needed products. They praise the GAVI Alliance, a group of major donors that created a $1.5-billion fund to develop a vaccine that prevents deaths of children from diseases like pneumonia, and a project in which it was found, through testing, that road safety in Kenya could be improved by posting stickers in cars advising passengers to complain if the driver goes too fast.
To read more, go to: foreignpolicy.com.
