Can a Phone Be a Cow? (with Philip Auerswald)
6/22/20261 hr 20 min
Can a phone be a cow? It could in 1990s Bangladesh. This was the insight of a small number of mobile phone market pioneers who helped catalyze the spread of the greatest technological revolution in human history. Listen as George Mason University economist Philip Auerswald speaks to EconTalk's Russ Roberts about how the extension of connectivity to traditionally excluded populations led to wide-scale transformations in productivity. They discuss the role of little-known entrepreneurs such as Iqbal Quadir and innovators like Claude Shannon in bringing the mobile phone to the entire world. Other topics include 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 what Auerswald calls the most important question the field of economics can ask: How much of human progress is inevitable, and how much depends on the determination of remarkable individuals?
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First 90 secondsRuss Roberts· Host0:00
[upbeat music] Welcome to EconTalk, conversations for the curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to econtalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode and find links and other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to two thousand and six. Our email address is mail@econtalk.org. We'd love to hear from you. [upbeat music] Today is May twenty-sixth, twenty twenty-six, and before introducing today's guest, I wanna let listeners know that we'll be doing an EconTalk book club around the Iliad by Homer. The first episode with Ido Livroni of Shalem College, who has been teaching the Iliad for over a decade, will air July sixth. It will provide some useful context on the book to help you get started, and I hope inspire you to read it. Additional episodes, I don't know how many, will air in the weeks to follow. At least one, maybe two. And we'll be using the Fagles translation, but there are many others to choose from. And now for today's guest, economist and author Philip Auerswald of George Mason University. Philip was last here in September of twenty seventeen talking about populism. Our topic for today is his latest book with the delightful title, A Phone Is a Cow: How Pioneers