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<DIV><FONT face=Arial>Hey, Richard:</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>Thought the first milers might like to see
this.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial>New from the Economist today - <A
href="http://www.economist.com/daily/columns/techview/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11434920&fsrc=nwl">http://www.economist.com/daily/columns/techview/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11434920&fsrc=nwl</A></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV>The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) regularly
releases a ranking of broadband penetration, speeds and prices across its 30
countries. </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>. . .the excellent report, written by Taylor Reynolds and Sacha
Wunsch-Vincent, goes beyond the numbers and examines why broadband is actually
useful. And here the authors face a problem: there simply is not good data to
show that broadband matters. Like Banquo at Macbeth's banquet, the ghost of Dr
Solow's “productivity paradox” disrupts the OECD's pleasant narrative.</DIV>
<P>Of course, every web-surfer knows that one can do things with amazing
efficiency online. But there is little evidence to support the notion that
faster is inherently better. Can the Japanese and Koreans (who finish at the top
of OECD's charts) do something at 100MB that the Americans, British and Germans
(in the middle tier) can't at 20MB? The idea that “bigger is better broadband”
is orthodoxy, not economics. So is its corollary, the neo-Cartesian logic that
goes: “Broadband ergo innovation.”</P></BODY></HTML>