Hausmann, Hidalgo et al.: The Atlas of Economic Complexity: Mapping Paths to Prosperity (2011)

The Atlas of Economic Complexity: Mapping Paths to Prosperity measures the diversity of productive knowledge of 128 countries and demonstrates remarkable predictive value in forecasting how fast countries will grow. Its authors argue that it is 10 times more accurate at predicting growth over a decade than the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Index. The framework is used to project growth to 2020.

China (1), India (2) and Thailand (3) top the rankings for per capita growth potential followed by Belarus (4), Moldova (5), Zimbabwe (6), Ukraine (7), Bosnia and Herzegovina (8), Panama (9), and Mexico (10). For these countries, the current level of productive knowledge is unusually high for their level of income which should allow them to catch up faster than other nations. Seven Eastern European countries rank in the top 20 in terms of expected growth in income per capita while only two Latin American countries (Panama and Mexico) are in that group.

The Atlas identifies eight Sub-Saharan African countries among the Top Ten for expected GDP growth: Uganda (1), Kenya (2), Tanzania (3), Zimbabwe (4), Madagascar (5), Senegal (6), Malawi (7), and Zambia (10). The other Top Ten nations are India (8) and Guatemala (9). Unfortunately, Sub-Saharan African countries also dominate the bottom 10 countries in terms of expected growth per capita.

Meanwhile, several Eastern European countries rank surprisingly high in their Economic Complexity, which is a gauge to measure their productive knowledge. The Atlas ranks the Czech Republic eighth and Slovenia tenth while Hungary and the Slovak Republic appear in the top 20. Other Top Ten ranked countries in economic complexity include Japan (1), Germany (2), Switzerland (3), Sweden (4), Austria (5), Finland (6), Singapore (7), and the United Kingdom (9).

The United States, at position 13, is not listed among the Top Ten ranking for economic complexity and is ranked 85th for expected GDP growth.

“A country’s competitiveness is driven by the amount of productive knowledge that its people and organizations hold and it is expressed in the variety and complexity of the products it is able to successfully export. Productive knowledge does a remarkable job at explaining why countries are rich or poor and why some catch up and others do not,” says Ricardo Hausmann, report co-author and director of CID.

“In the short run, countries with natural resource wealth can be rich without much productive knowledge and get access to the world’s knowledge through imports. In the long run, however, wells run dry and mines get depleted, and income sooner or later will reflect the productive knowledge of the economy,” says César Hidalgo, report co-author and director of the Macro Connections group at the MIT Media Lab. (from press release)

Authors: Ricardo Hausmann, Cesar A. Hidalgo, Sebastian Bustos, Michele Coscia, Sarah Chung, Juan Jimenez, Alexander Simoes, Muhammed A. Yildirim.
Published in October 2011
A collaboration between Center for International Development at Harvard University and Macro Connections group at the MIT Media Lab.
ISBN 0615546625, 9780615546629
362 pages
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

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Tim Wu: The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (2010)

In this age of an open Internet, it is easy to forget that every American information industry, beginning with the telephone, has eventually been taken captive by some ruthless monopoly or cartel. With all our media now traveling a single network, an unprecedented potential is building for centralized control over what Americans see and hear. Could history repeat itself with the next industrial consolidation? Could the Internet—the entire flow of American information—come to be ruled by one corporate leviathan in possession of “the master switch”? That is the big question of Tim Wu’s pathbreaking book.

As Wu’s sweeping history shows, each of the new media of the twentieth century—radio, telephone, television, and film—was born free and open. Each invited unrestricted use and enterprising experiment until some would-be mogul battled his way to total domination. Here are stories of an uncommon will to power, the power over information: Adolph Zukor, who took a technology once used as commonly as YouTube is today and made it the exclusive prerogative of a kingdom called Hollywood . . . NBC’s founder, David Sarnoff, who, to save his broadcast empire from disruptive visionaries, bullied one inventor (of electronic television) into alcoholic despair and another (this one of FM radio, and his boyhood friend) into suicide . . . And foremost, Theodore Vail, founder of the Bell System, the greatest information empire of all time, and a capitalist whose faith in Soviet-style central planning set the course of every information industry thereafter.

Explaining how invention begets industry and industry begets empire—a progress often blessed by government, typically with stifling consequences for free expression and technical innovation alike—Wu identifies a time-honored pattern in the maneuvers of today’s great information powers: Apple, Google, and an eerily resurgent AT&T. A battle royal looms for the Internet’s future, and with almost every aspect of our lives now dependent on that network, this is one war we dare not tune out.

Part industrial exposé, part meditation on what freedom requires in the information age, The Master Switch is a stirring illumination of a drama that has played out over decades in the shadows of our national life and now culminates with terrifying implications for our future.

Publisher Alfred A. Knopf, 2010
Borzoi Books
ISBN 0307269930, 9780307269935
366 pages

review (Peter Decherney, Nathan Ensmenger, Christopher S. Yoo)

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google books

PDF (EPUB; updated on 2012-7-16)

Ivan Illich: Tools for Conviviality (1973–) [EN, DE]

“Ivan Illich has aroused worldwide attention as a formidable critic of some of society’s most cherished institutions – organized religion, the medical profession, compulsory education for all.

In Tools for Conviviality he carries further his profound questioning of modern industrial society by showing how mass-production technologies are turning people into the accessories of bureaucracies and machines.

Tools for Conviviality was published only two years after Deschooling Society. In this new work Illich generalized the themes that he had previously applied to the field of education: the institutionalization of specialized knowledge, the dominant role of technocratic elites in industrial society, and the need to develop new instruments for the reconquest of practical knowledge by the average citizen. Illich proposed that we should ‘invert the present deep structure of tools’ in order to ‘give people tools that guarantee their right to work with independent efficiency.'”

Publisher Harper & Row, New York, 1973
World Perspective series
SBN 060121386
xxv+110 pages

Reviews: Michael G. Michaelson (New York Times Book Review, 1973), John L. Elias (CrossCurrents, 1974), John Touhey (World Affairs, 1974), Romesh Diwan (Economic & Political Weekly, 1975), Galye Avant (American Political Science Review, 1975).

Tools for Conviviality (English, 1973, 4 MB, added on 2019-10-1; HTML)
Tools for Conviviality (English, 1975, 2 MB, updated on 2019-10-1)
Selbstbegrenzung. Eine politische Kritik der Technik (German, trans. Ylva Eriksson-Kuchenbuch, 1975/1998, added on 2019-10-1)