Can Technology End Poverty?

...this is the title of an ongoing boston review forum debating just that. i've only gotten through a few of them, but i particularly like this installment by kentaro toyama. after five years working on ICT4D (information and communications technologies for development) research for microsoft in india, he comes to a conclusion that really should strike us as common sense (but then, i'm often struck by how little common sense sometimes plays a role in development)....

This myth of scale is the religion of telecenter proponents, who believe that bringing the Internet into villages is enough to transform them. Most recently, there is the cult of the mobile phone: one New York Times Magazine headline ran, “Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?” The article went on to assert, “the possibilities afforded by a proliferation of cellphones are potentially revolutionary.”

“Revolutionary.” The myth of scale is seductive because it is easier to spread technology than to effect extensive change in social attitudes and human capacity. In other words, it is much less painful to purchase a hundred thousand PCs than to provide a real education for a hundred thousand children; it is easier to run a text-messaging health hotline than to convince people to boil water before ingesting it; it is easier to write an app that helps people find out where they can buy medicine than it is to persuade them that medicine is good for their health.