Economic growth and infrastructure investment
There's a large report out from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development this month on the relationship between development and information technologies. In skimming it this evening, I noticed an emphasis on the importance of government policy in enforcing competition or promoting broadband uptake. The idea is that broadband policy is closely linked to economic growth:
Corporate analysts estimate that broadband could contribute hundreds of billions of dollars a year to the GDP of developed countries in the next few years, and liken it to water and electricity as “the next great utility” (Whisler and Saksena, 2003).
(from p.45). The work of growth theorists reveals that choices made by government to stimulate the production of new ideas can have an significant effect on economic growth. Compared to a country with restraints on idea-generation diversity, a country supporting free trade in ideas should tend to have a greater amount of resources devoted to idea-generation and thus a higher rate of economic growth. At the level of the country’s economy as a whole, increasing returns should be the result. The state of a country's telecommunications infrastructure has strong effects on economic growth — and the fact that our public infrastructure is under the control of such a concentrated duopoly of access providers (none of whom is interested in providing open, unprioritized internet access) should be a cause for great governmental concern.
Better growth policy could have implications for the standard of living of all Americans that are so enormous that they are hard to understand. For example, if the rate of economic growth over the next 45 years or so were to increase by 0.5% per year, it could fix all of the budget difficulties associated with the aging of the boomer generation, with a lot left over.
I'm at the tail end of that generation, so I'm anxious to get this fixed. We won't be stimulating the production of new ideas by having telcos/cablecos in charge of innovation.
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