For export of services to benefit the workers, you’d need local governance infrastructure that effectively maintains public goods, which also currently doesn’t exist for most people.
As you hint at, access to the digital economy helps more developed areas at best, the worst off don’t benefit. The poverty trap many are in is unfortunately harder to crack, and requires substantial upfront investment, not trickle down approaches. But most countries cannot get loans for such efforts and companies have little incentive to advance/maintain such large public goods.
I haven’t thought about this enough and would appreciate reading reactions to the following:
For lasting poverty alleviation, I’d guess it’s better to focus on scalable education, governance and infrastructure initiatives, powered by locals to enable integration into the culture. Does it seem correct that the development of self-determination creates positive feedback loops that also aid cooperation?
Also, this can all be aided by AI, but focusing on AI, as some suggest in the comments, seems unlikely to succeed at solving economic & governance development in the poorest areas. Would you agree that AI deployment can’t obviously reduce the drivers of coordination failures at higher levels of governance, as those are questions of inter-human trust?
Thanks for writing this up, excited for the next!
One major bottleneck to adoption of software & service industries is that the infrastructure doesn’t exist—more than 50% of people don’t have access to the bandwidth that makes our lives on the internet possible. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/fixing-the-global-digital-divide-and-digital-access-gap/ (That’s also not solved by Starlink because it’s too expensive.)
For export of services to benefit the workers, you’d need local governance infrastructure that effectively maintains public goods, which also currently doesn’t exist for most people.
As you hint at, access to the digital economy helps more developed areas at best, the worst off don’t benefit. The poverty trap many are in is unfortunately harder to crack, and requires substantial upfront investment, not trickle down approaches. But most countries cannot get loans for such efforts and companies have little incentive to advance/maintain such large public goods.
I haven’t thought about this enough and would appreciate reading reactions to the following: For lasting poverty alleviation, I’d guess it’s better to focus on scalable education, governance and infrastructure initiatives, powered by locals to enable integration into the culture. Does it seem correct that the development of self-determination creates positive feedback loops that also aid cooperation?
Also, this can all be aided by AI, but focusing on AI, as some suggest in the comments, seems unlikely to succeed at solving economic & governance development in the poorest areas. Would you agree that AI deployment can’t obviously reduce the drivers of coordination failures at higher levels of governance, as those are questions of inter-human trust?