Poorer countries are increasingly the early tech adopters

Despite the fact that historically, industrial revolutions haven’t been kind to poor people, this article claims that in the global shift (what the World Economic Forum (WEF) is calling the Fourth Industrial Revolution) we are seeing a different story unfold. Apparently, the poorest populations are now the early tech adopters and the first to benefit from new technologies that are improving health.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/...ies-are-increasingly-the-early-tech-adopters/

 

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America through WWII might be an earlier example of this. The American advantage in military technology, for example, dates back to the Revolutionary War (several foreign countries sent observers to the American Civil War, partly to see the latest weaponry and tactics in action). Then cars, roads, trains, airplanes, telephones, bridges, farming machinery, etc and so forth.

Not having sunk costs in infrastructure to lose might be a part of the situation. Farming machinery in the US did not face an agricultural landscape and economy in which much had been invested. Compare the social disruption and misery of the Enclosure in Great Britain, with the lack of such consequences in the pioneer development of agriculture outside the Confederacy in the US (the Red population having been removed by disease well in advance, and without having sunk generations of investment in the status quo)

 

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In the last few decades, third-world countries have gone immediately from no phones to cell-phones. It's a lot cheaper to put in cell-phone towers than to wire everyone up with phones the old way.

I'm not sure if that gives them any kind of advantage though. It's not like the richer countries don't have cell phones of their own. It's more a matter of shrinking the earlier gap in access to communications.

 

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Bypassing the establishment of a power grid and jumping straight to solar panels could certainly help them catch up fairly quickly.