Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think

by Peter H. Diamandis

One of the best examples is the telecom Grameenphone, which started in Bangladesh in 1997, and, as of February 2011, had thirty million subscribers in that country. Along the way, Grameenphone invested $1.6 billion in network infrastructure—which means that money made in Bangladesh actually stayed in Bangladesh. But the even bigger impact has been on poverty reduction. Economists at the London School of Business and Finance figured out that adding ten phones per one hundred people adds 0.6 percent to the GDP of a developing country. Nicholas Sullivan, in his book about the rise of microloans and cellular technology, You Can Hear Me Now: How Microloans and Cell Phones Are Connecting the World’s Poor to the Global Economy, explains what this really means: “Extrapolating from UN figures on poverty reduction (1 percent of GDP growth results in a 2 percent poverty reduction), that 0.6 percent growth would cut poverty by roughly 1.2 percent. Given 4 billion people in poverty, that means that with every 10 new phones per 100 people, 48 million graduate from poverty, to borrow a phrase from Mohammad Yunus.” Critics have pointed out that this approach can take us only so far, but they fail to mention that may actually be far enough. Hart and Prahalad’s BOP argument is essentially one of commodification: take existing goods and services and make them orders of magnitude cheaper, then sell them on a massive scale. But there are two additional features. First, the methodology required...