Leave computers to the market economy

Here are my thoughts on One Laptop Per Child.

Here is an excellent example how shooting for the moon misses the mark. The articles goes in to great detail, but I want to focus on the fact that the infastructure is not in place to support One Laptop Per Child. They don't have teachers to teach or chalkboards to write on. Instead of using the money for the R&D for the laptops and then buying them, use the money for something that will actually help now. Spreading technoglogy is a good thing; let's start from the bottom and work our way up.

Leave computers to the market economy. I am a link.

The very worst idea in international development circles is the One Laptop Per Child scheme being fronted by academic Nicholas Negroponte. The idea is that developing country budgets and development aid will be spent buying computers for up to two billion children in the developing world. The organisers want these computers to cost $100 each (although they haven't actually been able to meet that target price) and be ordered in minimum quantities of 1m units. They will be handed out without charge.

The scheme is doomed to disappoint because it envisages Negroponte's laptop design as the single, monopoly type of computer for two billion children across the developing world. Although Apple apparently offered its Mac OS X software to the scheme for free, the offer was rejected because they were determined only to open source software. Moreover, the open source operating system has been given a special user interface not used anywhere else. They've dropped the idea of working on a "desktop" and there is no such thing as a folder for organising documents, for example. These metaphors, of course, have worked very successfully. Negroponte's rejection of the desktop user interface is a fundamental mistake. People have tried doing these sort of special educational user interfaces in rich countries and they've flopped.

Open source software should compete against non-open source variants. Different hardware, similarly, should compete. The one-size-fits-all approach is flawed because Western academics can't know the specific needs of two billion users. The African child who desperately wants to be a graphic designer for the African subsidiary of global company might want a computer that can run Adobe software. A child musician might want a computer that can run Sibelius, the music composition software used by famous composers and American and European schools. The one-size-fits-all laptop won't run these programs.

Another problem of the scheme is the reliability issue. What happens if these laptops aren't very reliable? In the market economy, companies compete on reliability. PC Magazine publishes an annual study of reliability. But the incentives to be reliable are going to be a lot weaker with this laptop project.

Moreover, the laptop proposal is simply a very wasteful use of money when there are more important priorities. The Indian Ministry of Education has attacked the laptop as "pedagogically suspect". India's Atanu Dey says that in his country:

Tens of millions of children don't go to school, and of the many who do, they end up in schools that lack blackboards and in some cases even chalk. Government schools - especially in rural areas - are plagued with teacher absenteeism. The schools lack even the most rudimentary of facilities such as toilets (the lack of which is a major barrier to girl children.)

So, how long before eBay gets flooded with people flogging the things?