Bruce Upbin

Bruce Upbin, Forbes Staff

I manage our technology coverage.

7/23/2009 @ 2:42PM

Radical Development

Paul Romer, economics professor at Stanford University, began his presentation at TEDGlobal by showing a photograph of a handful of African students doing their homework under the streetlights at an airport because they don’t have electricity in their home. A century-old technology they lack, but the students do have cellphones.

The problem with this picture: The country has gotten the rules wrong. The utility is forced to sell at a very low subsidized price so it has no incentive to sign up more customers. The cellphone company operates under the opposite rule of making an incremental profit per new customer signed. How do we change rules? One way is to give more choices to people and more choices to leaders (“who are also people”), such as giving them the choice to let the utility make some money by signing up new customers.

Rules can be bad and hard to change because governments are too weak (Haiti, Somalia) or too strong (North Korea). Just look at how these three countries appear as dark areas in satellite photographs of the Earth at night. Yet coercion is not a viable means for getting these countries to get on the development path. China’s example of breakout growth in the past 20 years is a result of measured rule-changing, of staged development toward a market model–from Hong Kong north to the special economic zones in the mainland south and then on to 14 coastal cities extending beyond Beijing. China changed its rules from a closed economy, preserving choices for people and doing it at the right scale.

Romer proposed the idea of setting up charter cities, scaled projects that would use some of the vast tracts of available land in Cuba, Africa and elsewhere. He challenges the notion that there is little land left for humans to urbanize without wrecking our food supply and environment. The three billion people now living in cities only occupy 3% of Earth’s arable land. We could add another billion to cities and increase that footprint only another 1%, which would also dramatically reduce the human footprint elsewhere. These cities could allow people to live safe from crime, disease, unemployment, poor education. They could be financed by leveraging the increasing property values of the land being developed. This is how Singapore could afford its incredible development. The key is creating the right rules: for land rights, profit-sharing and the law. Keep an eye on Romer’s writings over the next several months as he reveals more about the charter city model.

Cheap, Safe Drinking Water For All

Michael Pritchard is the inventor of the LifeSaver bottle, which takes foul, polluted water and filters out bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites. It can process 6,000 liters worth before its cartridge needs to be changed. He demonstrated it onstage at TEDGlobal by pouring into an aquarium muddy water from the nearby river Cherwell, plus rabbit poop and plant matter. Then he stirred it up and poured it into the LifeSaver bottle. In moments out came sterile water. It’s cheap, safe and effective. Instead of spending billions of dollars desalinating, treating and shipping water and using man-made processes to do it, it puts to work nanoscale pore systems based on a natural process.

We could put the same LifeSaver technology in a jerry-can to provide clean water for people in rural areas of the developing world, allowing them to draw on water nearby. A family could drink cleanly for a year or more off one jerry-can and it only costs half a cent a day to run. The U.K. government, for one, spends 12 billion pounds a year on foreign aid, but with that same money, plus a little more (20 billion), everyone can have access to drinking water using something cheap like the LifeSaver bottle. Two million kids that die every year from diarrhea and dysentery will live.

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