How Pioneers of the Mobile Revolution Helped Millions Lift Themselves Out of Poverty
Interview with Philip Auerswald about his book A Phone Is a Cow: How Pioneers of the Mobile Revolution Helped Millions Lift Themselves Out of Poverty. Discusses how the extension of mobile connectivity to traditionally excluded populations led to wide-scale transformations in productivity. Explains the role of little-known entrepreneurs such as Iqbal Quadir and innovators like Claude Shannon in bringing the mobile phone to the entire world. Also covers William Nordhaus’s paper on the cost of illumination as a powerful metric of human progress, Schumpeter’s notion of innovation as new combinations, and how much of human progress is inevitable, and how much depends on the determination of remarkable individuals?
