Scientists caution on tunnel vision stagnation

Scan globally, reinvent locally.
– Economics Nobel
Laureate Joseph Stiglitz

Is anybody home?

For the traditionally gloomy science, Stiglitz may have created its newest branch: "the economics of information." But few here take his counsel to break out of tunnel vision.

Congressmen bicker over pork slabs. At City Halls and provincial capitols, the squabble remains over turf. Even Commission on Elections’ Luzviminda Tancangco cooks up excuse after excuse why she flubbed poll computerization.

But those who look beyond city limits will find bewildering change obliterating old landmarks. The extent of change is reminiscent of how the plow reshaped farms and the wheel, transport.

"The network age is replacing the industrial age," says the just-published United Nations Development Program (UNDP) book Capacity for Development.

The data are startling. In 1995, for example, less than 20 million were "wired" into the Internet. At the century’s end, there were more than 400 million. Three years from now, users may crest the one-billion mark. Cyberspace cafés are here to stay.

In mid-1993, there were less than 200 websites. Today, you can surf over 20 million. That includes one on Filipina mail-order brides. "We update twice a week with 66 lovely ladies from Cebu," it blares.

Computing power doubles every 18 months. So, codifying, storing and retrieving information are done at levels unimaginable, even in the 1990s.

Data can now be sent for a song. Technological breakthroughs are "driving down the costs of information storage and communication almost to zero," the UNDP book adds.

To transfer data in 1970, say from Japan to Manila, cost $150,000. That fell to 12 cents in 1999. What you could electronically store for a dollar, in 1970, has increased by 30,000 times.

Such radical changes do not only reshape the marketplace – from payrolls, bank ATMs to insurance claims, government budgets to research and food production – they recast our lives too, as seen in medical research, biotechnology – and those cellphones.

"Today, it matters less what one knows, than what information one has access to and can utilize," UNDP’s Sakiko Fukuda-Parr and Ruth Hill of Oxford University write. "This historic shift is altering rewards and penalties."

Some idea of the stakes is glimpsed in the surge of combined worldwide sales of knowledge-intensive services in a 17-year span: from $3.4 trillion to over $7.4 trillion. And firms that network have increased by 40 percent.

On the information highway, the rule is: no parking. Institutions and "businesses that do not take advantage become marginalized." They turn obsolete overnight. As Solzhenitsyn writes In the First Circle, "They don’t sell tickets to the past."

What prevents governments as well as businesses then from breaking out of the obsolete – and thrusting forward into the new?

E-mail takes one minute to get to the screen of a recipient, but an airmail letter from one point of the Philippines to another takes 10 days. Election counts take a full month compared to one to two days in Japan or the United Kingdom.

The Philippines lags in information infrastructure. A telephone line opens to cyberspace. We had 37 main lines per 1,000 population. Thailand had 84 and China, 70. There were 33 personal computers for every 1,000 Filipinos compared to 458 for Singapore.

"Perhaps the biggest obstacle in developing innovations lies in the human mind itself," Fukuda-Parr and Hill point out. "It can remain imprisoned in old assumptions and practices.

"These are yesterday’s men," the late National Scientist Dioscoro Umali said in a UP graduation address. "They talk in the political clichés of the past. Worse, they are oblivious of the ‘gathering storm.’"

"One searches in vain for their response to the real challenges to our survival, as individuals and as a nation," Umali noted. "Are we not all in danger of losing sight of the real future?"

The reality is our glut of yesterday’s men: from Malacañang, to Congress, City Halls and provincial capitols, down to the barangays. They are also losing their capacity to govern – given the gridlock from population growth, urbanization, mass poverty and crime.

Strait-jacketed into obsolete mindsets, yesterday’s men react with ad hoc solutions. Their timeframes are locked into the next elections.

And tunnel vision paralyzes innovation. "Do not look at the heavens through a bamboo reed," Japanese farmers wisely caution.

Development in the minds of traditional leaders remain ossified into improvements of socio-economic conditions. But in today’s rapidly shifting network age, far more is required, says Capacity for Development.

Governments and businesses must scan globally and see what is happening elsewhere. It’s no longer enough to expand human skills either. Or just create incentives for their use (unless you want to add to the brain drain).

"A new model for cooperation is emerging for the network age," the study adds. It’s one that taps into new cross-border networks of knowledge.

Don’t sell the politician short. "They can at least," Stephen Fry once wrote, "bring an empty mind to the problem."

"Today, development is thought of as transformation of societies," Stigliz wrote in the World Bank Development Report 1999. "An essential part of the transformation is a change in mindsets."

It’s a movement from yesterday’s men to innovators for tomorrow. – DEPTHnews