Hooray for Paul Romer
Paul Romer is the economist who noticed that economic growth kept increasing, and decided to find out why. His 1990 paper, “Endogenous Technological Change,” had an enormous impact. ('reason' interview here – very worth reading.)
Romer's New Growth Theory work rigorously shows that new ideas trigger economic growth. The 'reason' article summarizes a Romer paper from 2000 called ”Should the Government Subsidize Supply or Demand in the Market for Scientists and Engineers?” (Answer: the government should subsidize supply.) Tiny increases in growth rate will raise standards of living for enormous numbers of people, so we should try to do the best we can to encourage economic growth — that means encouraging new ideas — that means educating people to be scientists and engineers. (Note: Romer avoided law school.)
Well, I was already an enormous fan of Paul Romer's. I've just re-read a wonderful intellectual history of new growth theory by David Warsh that ended with a cheerful description of Romer's departure from standard academic life and entry into the creation of digitized teaching tools for economics students. Great stuff. But it gets even better:
Romer has a blog.
More enlightened social policy from Sweden and The Netherlands
Gordon Cook pointed recently to INEC, an International Network of E-Communities led by the Dutch ministry of economic affairs and the city of Stockholm. It's a group that shares best practices for community-led broadband initiatives. They're having a meeting in Stockholm next week.
INEC has drafted up a very succinct statement of broadband principles — a Declaration on Open Networks. It's well worth embracing. Some key language calling for the separation of transport and content:
Open, operator-neutral networks are believed to be the best way to ensure societal needs are met today and in the future.
It belongs to the core responsibility of government to ensure the development, evolvement, maintenance and functioning of communication infrastructures thus simultaneously ensuring the fairest possible market conditions for any service provider to freely compete over the infrastructure.
[I]nfrastructures should be able to carry symmetric ‘broadband’ connectivity which allows for symmetric high resolution video communications as well as other high grade symmetric data exchange
Broadband, by today’s standards, is understood to cover bandwidths of 100 megabit per second on a symmetric basis – and more.
And the call to action:
The signatories call on all public and private stakeholders to embrace the principles outlined in this declaration and to pursue investments and forge the appropriate conditions as for all to enjoy the social and economic benefits that flow from the impacts of open telecommunication infrastructures.
They're agnostic as to how this infrastructure gets created or run —
An open broadband infrastructure can be owned by a public entity or a public-private partnership or by one or more private entities. The role of governments as described under article three is to ensure the deployment and functioning of open broadband networks. This aim can be achieved by means of full or partial public ownership of the infrastructure or by dedicated laws and regulations guaranteeing the open nature of a privately-owned infrastructures.
The point of all this is that society as a whole benefits from open networks. They'll produce diverse forms of digital goods and services that we can choose — and we'll benefit from enormous economic growth as a result.