There have recently been a number of reports, such as that of the World Bank discussed by the Economist, that put in doubt that leapfrogging, i.e. a direct leap into post-industrial development using the latest technologies is possible. The key argument is that there is little empirical proof of it happening, and that developing countries seem unable to integrate these new technologies, because they lack the necessary infrastructural, governance, and perhaps even cultural base. In other words: no new tech without many previous layers of old tech.
Kevin Kelly has recently updated his older article on the Myth of Leapfrogging, where these arguments are well presented and commented. I recommend reading both contributions in full.
I have asked Vinay Gupta on his thoughts, here are his comments, previously published in the Appropedia wiki.
Vinay Gupta:
I’m going to take a brief shot at outlining what a “Leapfrogged” world might look like, one in which smart use was made of available technologies. In a sense, this Leapfrogged World is already around us, it’s just very heavily mixed in with both the traditional-technologies world and the direct-copy-of-worst-practices world.
In particular, I’ll be covering what can be leapfrogged, what cannot be leapfrogged, some thinking about the embedded capital base of the first world, and “invisible leapfrogging” – the leapfrogging which happened so fast, nobody called it that!
1. Leapfrogging
Leapfrogging (one of our favorite topics!) is the idea that countries without basic infrastructure like universal telecommunications can go directly to the best, most fitting solutions without having labor through the developmental struggle of telegraph, manually-switched telephony, direct-dial, brick-sized cell phones, analog cell phones, 3G digital. They just hop straight to 3G, piggybacking off the enormous human and capital investements it took to get there.
Leapfrogging is said to be a great equalizing force because the rich nations have already paid the price of developing these technologies, competition among companies in those nations keeps the technologies cheap, and the world’s poor gets the benefits. The poster-child for Leapfrogging is the the cellphone. (link goes to excellent and very human article about cellphone deployment in the poorer parts of the globe)
If you question the value of the consumer society, please remember that the only reason that the peasants in China have cell phones is because the people in LA demanded them (and were willing and able to pay) them 20 years ago!
2. One limit on leapfrogging
There is one proviso: according to Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute individual developing-world consumers will only leapfrog to technologies which are already deployed by the rich. Everybody wants an “American Toilet” not a urine-separating or composting one. Consumer preference is “do as the rich do” and there’s not much we can do about it, even if we know that “the rich” are doing it in a poor, expensive, messy way.
Other solutions may be ecologically better, but poor consumers are usually no more ecologically motivated than rich ones are, and often less. That’s damned inconvenient, but may not constrain institutional investment quite so much. Individuals may want the loud flush and the gleaming porcelain for their own house, but most people do not care how their school is lit or cooled.
3. What, exactly, did Industrialization buy us?
This is actually a really important question, and not one I’ve seen commonly asked. To understand what we have is critical to understanding what we might be able to export.
Start where you are, and work out from your skin to the edge of what you own and use.
For me, my clothes are mostly imported and/or high tech fabrics, then there is this laptop I’m writing on containing dozens of incredibly refined components, requiring tens of billions of dollars of capital to create. It plugs into 120V AC power. That runs back to another trillion dollars of capital: the National Grid. The lights over head are CFL, imported from China. The wireless internet connection goes to a cable modem, running over incredibly expensive buried copper wires laid to carry yesterday’s-big-thing, Cable TV. The water I’m drinking is drawn from Lake Michigan, filtered and purified by a giant factory, and fed to my house through a baroque system of sterile pipes – another few hundred million, right there. The house I am in is, in itself, another couple of hundred thousand dollars worth of capital, and relies extensively on the availability of lumber, shingles, glass.
This is modernity: a pile of capital, of sunk costs, running into the quadrillions of dollars. This is the amount of capital that it takes to provide average Americans or Europeans with our lifestyle.
Leapfrogging provides a way of freeing the poor world from the development cost of technologies like the mobile phone. Fortunately, higher technology tends to have lower and more modular installation capital requirements. But still, this world we are taking about exporting parts of is expensive, interwoven, complex, and took many, many generations to build up. It’s existence is not just a scientific or technological phenomena, but has roots in democracy, christian and secular culture and long-dead greek philosophers.
Our Rome was not built in a day.
4. The leapfrogging nobody noticed.
Consumer goods and global services turn out to travel extremely well. You simply put consumer goods in a box and ship them: leapfrogging achieved. You can put a Gameboy anywhere on the planet and leapfrog the entertainment revolution. Perhaps not helpful, but true 🙂 The truck that carried the Gameboy is also leapfrogging – no Model T, no horse-drawn carriage, but an 18 wheeler likely lugged it most of the way. Transport technologies were the first leapfrogging! All those land rovers in Somalia? Real leapfrogging.
Likewise, services like GPS and satellite imaging are already more-or-less pre-leapfrogged. The hardware has global reach and you just need to know who to call to get the images.
This kind of leapfrogging is, in essence, done. You can buy Coca-cola or a derivative product more or less anywhere on the planet and the same is largely true for television and radio. (see this great article for a discussion of television availability in the world)
There may be some issues with cost, and support infrastructure and so on, but basically, this stuff has worked. Television, radio, satellite services and the like are everywhere. It’s notable that “luxuries” like television appear to have out-paced “necessities” like clean water. What this says about human nature I’m not quite sure.
5. The Leapfrogging Gap: Leapfrogging Infrastructure
What’s left to leapfrog is, in fact, the dull old Industrial age stuff: reliable electricity, plumbing, water supply, farming. Most of the fruits of the Space Age – chips and waveguides and orbiting birds – turns out to travel easily. It’s the backhoe-centric world of civil engineering that we need to make available or help find substitutes for.
This is a genuinely hard problem. Industrial age artifacts are quintessentially different from Space age artifacts. They are raw, big, dug-in, enduring, measured in gigawatts not miliwatts. They require elaborate maintenance from skilled work teams, rather than working forever and being downcycled at obsolescence.
Think about trying to provide rural telephone service in China using Industrial Age telephony technologies. Thousands of kilometers of cable per village. Trenches, poles and strung wires. Wire stolen to be sold on the black market: a problem nearly everywhere there are poor people and exposed cabling. It’s just never going to happen.
This is the leapfrogging gap: all of the services which our society continues to deliver using essentially Industrial Age solutions have turned out not to travel universally into the poor world.
Satellite dishes are everywhere, but many of those households don’t have a completely reliable clean water supply, because you can put the satellite dish on a truck, but the water supply requires Victorian England to construct.
Leapfrogging infrastructure is going to require a new generation of infrastructure, and the good news is: it is already here.
6. Small is Profitable and the New Infrastructure
Small is Profitable is the Rocky Mountain Institute’s book on distributed power generation. A 400 page door-stopper, selected as The Economist’s Book of the Year (2003) SiP outlines the financial and technical case for a new approach to providing high quality and high profit margin electrical services to the world. This new approach is a “Post-Industrial” power generation methodology: fewer Industrial style power stations, lots of analysis and feedback loops, lots of technology like microturbines, combined solar-and-wind energy provision, lots of financial modeling to understand the real cost of options. Rather than one-size-fits-all 120V from every socket, powered by a single continent-spanning machine, SiP envisages highly granular power delivery, with each location getting its power from the best available resources: microturbines for some kinds of factories, solar/wind for some percentage of city supplies because the availability of those natural resources closely matches power demand, and so on.
The vision is a fine-grained lattice of different power generation systems not as a stop-gap measure until a national grid is deployed, but in many cases, instead of a national grid, simply because it delivers better quality power at a lower cost.
It is impossible to do the book justice, or (frankly) even make it’s case comprehensible, in a single paragraph: it’s like trying to summarize Lord of the Rings! Power To The People by Vijay Vaitheeswaran covers a lot of the same ground and is a much easier read!
The critical point from the “New Infrastructure” perspective is that the SiP style power-services model can be rolled out in a very fine-grained fashion: one household, one village, one town at a time. Rather than sinking a billion dollars into a power station, and another billion into a grid to distribute the power, SiP envisages a thousand small investments in solar, wind, hydropower, microturbines, even diesel generators where appropriate, leading to an incredibly efficient, fine-grained distribution of power generation resources.
This break from the industrial model gets us back into the “sweet spot” for leapfrogging: technologies one can put on a truck and ship, which do not require a thousand miles of trenches to be dug at the destination or Victorian engineering to maintain. Power generation with the same dynamics as satellite dishes and televisions.
As the book says, “it is already happening” – it documents a trend and lays out the financial and technical case for the trend to accelerate, but it is based on what is happening in the real world, not futurism.
Surprisingly, there are similar approaches to other areas in which our civilization is dependent on Industrial infrastructure. Water purification and sewage disposal are both areas which are still firmly embedded in the giant-factory-and-trench-based-service-distribution-network model.
Technologies like solar-powered ultraviolet water purification, for example, have great promise for village and even household-level deployment. A box you can ship which, on arrival, provides first-world-standard drinking water anywhere there is sunlight.
There are a billion people without clean water. They are likely never going to get services from giant water chlorination factories, with thousands of miles of brick-lined tubes and a spiderlike network of PVC and copper running to shiny chrome taps. But they could have drinking water.
Composting toilets likewise offer safe, sanitary disposal of human waste without an industrial sewage processing facility and super-abundant clean water to carry the human waste to the factory.
This is the new infrastructure.
7. The Leapfrogged World: Services without Industrial Infrastructure
I’ve simplified, almost to the point of parody, by saying “if you can put it in a box and ship it, it’s leapfroggable.”
However, as a rule of thumb, it is close enough to explain most of what we see around us: even a cell phone tower is, in essence, something you can ship in a Sea Container.
The Leapfrogged world is shipped in boxes. There are almost no backhoes. In the rural world, on arrival, unskilled or semi-skilled people open the boxes and unpack the goods. Instructions make it clear how the devices are to be used and once every couple of weeks, a Barefoot Solar Engineer comes around to help make sure everything is set up correctly and that the water is clean, the toilets properly operated, the batteries charged properly, the refrigerators used correctly, and so on.
In the urban world, it’s the same process, but the boxes are microturbines, cell-wireless routers, microwave backhauls. In the leapfrogged world, the endless snaking corridors of pipes are largely replaced by trucks which come around once in a month and recharge the fuel supply on your fuel cells.
Modular, granular, fine-grained, and shipping in on trucks. Not the Aswan Dam, but a hundred thousand 12 volt village solar grids. A curiously future-retro combination of space-aged and mud-and-stick houses. High density, ultra-wire(less)ed urban hubs, and villages with solar-electric lighting and drinking water.
This is the leapfrogged world.”
Kevin Carson addresses this comment directly to Kevin Kelly, referenced in the above article:
“I attempted to leave the following comment at Kelley’s post, before I
realized it was an old one and comments are apparently closed:
The problem with your argument is that history may not be a reliable guide.
What you say is true, so long as centralized infrastructure and
large-scale, capital-intensive, corporate-owned industry remain viable
and accessible.
But leapfrogging to decentralized, ephemeral systems may be the only
viable option if adopting the older style of centralized
infrastructure and capital-intensive production becomes unsustainable.
I expect that we’re in the early stages of a number of dovetailing
crises that will render the old kind of large-scale, industrial
capitalism unsustainable: Peak Oil; assorted other input crises
resulting from the inevitable economic law that demand for subsidized
inputs (like long-distance shipping) outstrips the state’s fiscal
resources for providing them; and the realization crisis facing
capitalism, as described by Michel Bauwens, resulting from the growing
unsustainability of IP-based business models.
I believe state capitalism is hitting the wall of resource and input
crises at the very time small-scale production technology of the kind
Borsodi, Mumford and Bookchin envisioned is approaching a singularity.
The latter singularity will mean the feasibility of shifting ever
greater amounts of production from wage labor to the informal and
household economies, which may be extremely welcome as a safety net
when the old industrial economy stagnates and runs out of gas.
The old centralized industry, to put it bluntly, may not be there.
And the “small is beautiful” stuff may be all that’s left.”
Kevin Carson, via email:
I don’t expect household and informal production to
completely supplant factory production. But Ralph Borsodi argued that
some two-thirds of what we consume could be most efficiently produced
using small-scale electrically powered machinery in the household, and
I believe he would have agreed that much of the other third could have
been best produced in small factories serving local markets.
What he envisioned, as he described it, was a shift in production of
most of the goods we consume from the factory to small-scale machine
production in the household, with relatively small factories existing
mainly to produce the small-scale household machinery rather than to
produce consumer goods for direct consumption.
There are some forms of production that require extremely large scale,
like the kind of heavy engine block IC engine that has prevailed in
the auto industry since WWII, the large jet aircraft, and the
microprocessor. But with the removal of all subsidies, I’d expect the
production of passenger and cargo jets to virtually disappear, because
they simply won’t pay for themselves in a free market. The fraction
of existing long-distance shipping that would survive in a
decentralized economy would probably rely almost entirely on
railroads. I would also expect the demand for automobiles of
present-day design to shrink by more than an order of magnitude, as we
moved toward walkable communities and the use of light rail for travel
between communities, and much lighter electric vehicles were
sufficient for the remaining functions of transporting people from
rural areas into town or transporting goods from railheads to retail
outlets. Microprocessors are probably most problematic, but a shift
to reprogrammable chips will probably reduce primary production to a
small fraction of the market, with most of the need being supplied by
the recycling of chips from old appliances in the same way a major
part of present-day steel needs are met by small mini-mills recycling
scrap metal.
And in almost all other industries besides that tiny handful, the
prevailing firm and plant size is far, far beyond the optimum for
meeting economies of scale. So we could get the vast majority of what
we presently consume, more efficiently, with the largest scale of
production being a small factory serving a local market area of a
hundred thousand people or so–and most production being carried out
at the level of household and neighborhood or small town. IMO, once
we reach a minimum threshold of technical development (say, that of
the industrialized West in the 1950s), the single biggest factor in
quality of life is the balance between work and leisure. With an end
to subsidized waste and to the portion of commodity price that
reflects embedded rents on IP and other forms of artificial property,
I’d expect the average workweek to be one or two days. That’s an
immense improvement in quality of life, even if we have to give up
SUVs and use composting toilets.
I feel very strongly that the definition of Leapfrogging must include something about the ability of whatever consumer/producer unit is under discussion to PRODUCE the actual thing/infrastructure/system that is needed.
Leaving this out turns the world into consumers, and sets up a dialogue that allows Leapfrogging to be pursued by centralized industries as a simple market expansion goal.
In many cases, with regard to health and human welfare limited services, this is useful. Shipping welfare vaccines in sufficient amounts, or vitamin rich calories. This is especially useful in a time limited sense, though.
In other cases, though, the reliance on cost structuring from international subsidization of import products creates the illusion that foreign production may be cheaper or better for a local economy.
Many local economies can ill afford the choice right now, so it has to be a mix, but some priority must be placed on enabling local production of all required tools and products.
Sam Rose, via email:
Vinay, I liked your writing
One excerpt from it:
“There is one proviso: according to Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute individual developing-world consumers will only leapfrog to technologies which are already deployed by the rich. Everybody wants an “American Toilet” not a urine-separating or composting one. Consumer preference is “do as the rich do” and there’s not much we can do about it, even if we know that “the rich” are doing it in a poor, expensive, messy way. Other solutions may be ecologically better, but poor consumers are usually no more ecologically motivated than rich ones are, and often less. That’s damned inconvenient, but may not constrain institutional investment quite so much. Individuals may want the loud flush and the gleaming porcelain for their own house, but most people do not care how their school is lit or cooled”
Sam writes: The way that I read the above through my biases, that are based on thinking about things through Bio-Psycho-Social theories, is that core problem is how people define in their mind what “wealthy” actually is. And, how that peception is re-inforced by whatever mass media trickles to these people.
What if they had rich and engaging mediums that showed them a different kind of wealth? One that is based more on their core values, and less on those of the industrial world. That shows what is possible and available for them, and also shows them the darker sides of what we have in the industrial world, where following that path would likely lead them. The point I make here is that it is possible to reframe what “wealth” and “luxury” is for people.
I see their (developing world) perception is something like a toxic waste byproduct of mass media and commercialization need to entice and entice people here to spend more and more. This toxic waste posions the perceptions in people’s minds of what a “good” life is. Because, most of these ads, tv shows, etc are designed to appeal to base emotions and influence people in that way, a “commercial” psychology. You can either teach people to decipher these messages and understand what they really mean, or you can create a competing message (which is what David Korten proposes to do, BTW)
I hit on “being rich” as having something to share the other day. I think it is communicable.
Wealth is in the eye of the holder, agreed. What wealth we can mirror is what wealth we can appreciate.
Let’s go wide and deep, so that the allure of sharing health and the joy of composting toilets is communicable and mirror-able by all!