Technology is Your Future. And Your Past.

Bill Easterly, the only development academic provocative enough to have his own Twitter spoof account, has a new piece in Foreign Policy about the role of technology in development.

He and colleagues from the Harvard Business School and UC Berkley got together to remap the world, drawing new lines on old territories, and then parceled out the technologies of 3000 and 500 years past.

The conclusion? What happened in the past effects what's happening in the present.

To support the headsmacking obviousness of his assertion, he’s found proof: if a region had technology such as written language and fire back in 1000 BC (technology here of the idea sort, rather than the tool sort), that region is more likely to be wealthy.

In data from 1500 AD Easterly finds the same correlation: did you have guns, warships, and guns? (And compasses and paper, but mostly guns). Your region is more likely to be stable, prosperous, and technologically advanced.

The piece reads a little bit Jared Diamond, a little bit Malcolm Gladwell: determinist but accommodationist, generalist while cautioning against generalizing. If Europe knew how to build steam engines, locomotives were a natural evolution. But of course, China had wondrous technological advancement, so sometimes patterns just don’t hold.

Easterly asks us to learn from this research that the historical approach to development has been wrong. (Easterly generally always wants us to know that the way we do aid is wrong).

In his understanding, development is linked not to great structural approaches, but technological accretion. In order for development to occur, the very systems it sustains must be dismantled, and space must be made of individual innovators.

This all may be true.

It’s a two page article, and there are many counterfactuals and local considerations that Easterly is certainly aware of, and even hints at – the role of politics, the acceleration of communications, the deterministic power of markets in driving adoption of facilitating innovations. At the same time, he fails to raise questions about how regions with certain types of technology – such as weaponry – might have impacted the development of regions without.

But what’s really interesting about this article is that, for a skeptic, Easterly reveals himself as something of a technodeterminist: in his telling, technological advances are inherently societal advantages. Builders are hampered by conditional societal factors, and if the technology itself could be free to propagate, development would come apace. This might be true – and it might not.

Easterly’s a smart guy, and FP is a specialist-generalist rag, so it’s hard to know if this is just another swipe at his old employers (the Bank) or an actual framework through which he views technology. There's a paper out there for me to read, but for now, it’s just another provocative post by an academic with a dog in the fight.

(And Bill Easterly’s Twitter spoof? It's Bill Westerly – a grunting, dismissive, aid-leveling barbarian for the MDG set.)