Dear Colleagues, I suspect that we operate under two quite different concepts of "poor", which in turn gives rise to more confusion.
Under the first concept -as for instance used by UNDP for the Human Development Index- "poor" or "not so poor" is -to put it briefly- measured in terms of "liberty" - understood as real choices to conduct their own life -and "freedom"- understood as being free from most basic threats like risks to life or health, hunger, fear of oppression". (Thanks to FDR, who first coined these shorthand definitions). Under the second concept -as used by pure economists- "poor" or "not so poor" is measured in income, consumption, or productive capacities. Both concepts are somewhat related, but not in a straight forward manner: i.e. Bill Gates has apparently more liberties and freedoms than -say- the woman in the Philippines that puts the latest version of Windows XP into their boxes. Likewise there are backward-constraints: some services that imply more liberty -like education- or more freedom -like health services- need resources (i.e. they are not for free and hence the question arises what to do if those who need those services don't have nor can they contribute collectively the resources that are needed to provide those services). It isn't an extremely serious problem in countries or societies, where those "without" are a smaller fraction of the whole population. Here it can be solved by insurance and taxes (it's a classical "political" problem). However it becomes an extremely serious problem without easy solutions in those countries -the overwhelming majority- where those "without" count for 50% to 80% of the population. And in these cases it cannot be solved either by insurance or by taxes, simply because there aren't enough resources available that might be partially re-distributed. Having said all this, let me clarify my position: (1) There is no doubt that ICT can -and many times does- make the poor "less poor" in the sense of the first concept. (2) Yet even in these conditions a careful analysis beforehand is needed, to see whether the same effect could not be obtained by using a lesser amount of resources, without going over to "ICTs". I found out that sometimes ICT is indeed the most cost-effective solution, whereas in other situations it's an outright waste of resources. (3) However if we are talking about a win-win situation between corporations and the "poor" (persons, families, sectors, countries, regions) then it would be deeply unfair for the poor to measure on one side of "win" in terms of Dollars and Cents and on the other side of "win", in terms of liberty and freedom, because this implies that we condemn the "poor" to remain forever "poor" in the second sense, which -due to the backward-constraints mentioned above- implies that they will depend forever on charity or lack basic liberties and basic freedoms (on any level: persons, families, sectors, countries, regions). Yours truly, Cornelio ------------ This DOT-COM Discussion is funded by USAID's dot-ORG Cooperative Agreement with AED, in partnership with World Resources Institute's Digital Dividend Project, and hosted by GKD. http://www.dot-com-alliance.org and http://www.digitaldividend.org provide more information. To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: <http://www.dot-com-alliance.org/archive.html>
