The laptop wars - Will charity or profit end the digital divide? | Hacker News Reader

The laptop wars - Will charity or profit end the digital divide?

economist.com

14 pointsdavidw22 comments

I never understood complaints about the digital divide. I'm all for using cellphone minutes as a micro currency, and rigging a windmill to generate power in the middle of nowhere.

I'm just so much more concerned with the corruption-is-everywhere--i-cant-own-my-own-land--western-trade-barriers-killed-my-crop-yield--my-government-steals-aid divide.

Who cares about laptops when you have problems like that?

Laptops provide people the means to educate themselves and communicate with each other in new ways.

Education and communication are among the best tools available to address problems such as fighting government corruption and clarifying land-ownership rights.

I don't doubt that better educated and empowered locals will be able to solve problems better.

It is just remarkably indirect

With its mesh networking, I wonder how long until the XO is used like a cell phone ala http://mobileactive.org

Seriously. If I don't have drinking water, food, and protection from the elements, a laptop is the last thing on my mind.

Come on, the laptops are not being given people for whom access to food, water, and protection from the elements is a problem. The point is to provide the educated working poor in 2nd/3rd world countries access to tools so that they can improve their lives.

And for these people, access to education and communication is very, very important. To take one example: farmers in rural India have a very hard time getting a fair price for their crops because they can't access price information before harvest, they basically have to just hop on a bus to the nearest big village and take whatever price is offered by the middleman that day. Poor communication leads to an inefficient economy.

If you don't think that laptops are the most efficient way to help these people out, what are you proposing instead?

Sure. But once you can survive for the next couple of days - getting market prices without actually physically walking to market town - gets suprisingly useful.

OK, this is more of an explanation for the success of cell phones than laptops.

You could get Yelp recommendations for water holes not manned by Janjaweed militias. XO will save Darfur!

"Who cares about laptops when you have problems like that?"

It's not an either-or thing. Technology democratizes.

Yes it is either-or: attention is scarce. We are causing some of the problems in the third world, or at least supporting some bad systems.

When digging your self a hole: Step 1. stop digging

That's a false dilemma. It's like this argument:

"Why is the government spending money on scientific research? Its most important job is to ensure people's safety, and dollars are scarce! Therefore, the government should put all its efforts into preventing murders, drunk driving, etc., and there should be none left for luxuries like science."

That's a false dilemma because, depending on the situation, it's possible that money spent on scientific research will improve people's welfare more than if that same money was spent on law enforcement. For example, scientific research generates advances in forensics, criminal psychology, and sociology, which can make law enforcement more effective, and also in medicine, energy, and other areas that can improve human life in fundamental ways.

You're right that we're causing a lot of problems in the third world. For example, farm subsidies make it impossible for African farmers (who can produce some crops much more cheaply) to compete with American ones. So African farmers are locked out of the market and stay poor.

It seems that ending farm subsidies is much more important than giving computers to kids. But do you realize how expensive it would be to end farm subsidies? There's an entrenched industry that will fight you every step of the way. It might be a better use of our time and effort to get computers into the hands of poor children. It's far cheaper, and it'll help those kids learn about the outside world, communicate more widely, and learn technical skills that enable a few of them to create huge amounts of wealth in the future.

Farm subsidies is a great example, and I'm glad to hear more people understand the issue.

It is a good example because most people, when explained the situation, would opt to have more competition and help the third world with trade rather than aid. Americans think a third of the federal budget goes to foreign aid. Ridiculous.

Such a small percentage of people work in farming that it should be easy to convince people to make the change. People fear the lobby.

Profit.

Edit: Why do I read this article on screen? I mean - I have it on paper.. Damn procrastination.

What I have a hard time understanding is why the XO laptops are not sold in the US and other industrialized nations as well as the developing world.

The only reason I have heard is that they don't want to get too "commercial" with these...whatever. Surely economies of scale would kick in and they would be able to drop prices faster and therefore be more successful with the aims of this project?

How is the OLPC project "charity" when the governments buy the laptops from OLPC just as they would from Intel? The Economist is ridiculous, drawing false distinctions.

The project is being run as a non-profit. The money is to attempt to recoup costs and make the project self-sustaining.

Perhaps they should just buy old laptops from eBay add crank generators and software - then pass them on to the third world. That would mean much lower up-front capital requirements. I mean - I could organize such a project in my bedroom.

Take a look at the specs of the OLPC. It copes with pretty extreme conditions. Heat, moisture, accidental damage, lack of clean power. The screen is readable in African sunlight. I'd place a pretty decent wager you'd be hard pushed to find a $100 laptop on Ebay that'd exceed the life expectancy and usefulness of an XO.

Not to mention the nightmare of trying to create any sort of consistent environment on 1000's of disparate machines and the person-hours that that would entail. Furthermore, I recall reading something about trying to give the XO sort of a "kiddy look/feel" in order to discourage adults from absconding with them.

What I wanted to question was whether those huge up-front expenses needed to design and manufacture a new kind of laptop were worth it. I mean even if you had to pay $200 on ebay - you'd have virtually zero fixed costs.

Perhaps that project just does not need to scale down.

Sure the XO is a nice piece of equipment. I would even buy one myself for 100$ if it was available on the market. (Besides I'd really like to try a crank to power my computing - but it's does not come with the normal XO, or?)

not sure if you are being serious, but that approach is far from scalable. (Peru alone bought 270k XOs)

There are millions and millions of computers destined for landfills. It's a matter of re-directing them. Cost: Probably 20 dollars a unit or less.

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