An article in the New Yorker about relative poverty ran recently. I’m posting the first paragraph here:

In the summer of 1963, Mollie Orshansky, a forty-eight-year-old statistician at the Social Security Administration, in Washington, D.C., published an article in the Social Security Bulletin entitled “Children of the Poor.” “The wonders of science and technology applied to a generous endowment of natural resources have wrought a way of life our grandfathers never knew,” she wrote. “Creature comforts once the hallmark of luxury have descended to the realm of the commonplace, and the marvels of modern industry find their way into the home of the American worker as well as that of his boss. Yet there is an underlying disquietude reflected in our current social literature, an uncomfortable realization that an expanding economy has not brought gains to all in equal measure. It is reflected in the preoccupation with counting the poor—do they number 30 million, 40 million, or 50 million?”

The article goes on to discuss how poverty lines are drawn and how wealth is relative to your culture of reference.

What it doesn’t explore is something that has to do with Mr. Seibel’s previous post. Computers and internet access are the new TVs and dishwashers, they will soon be in even the most poverty stricken areas. Out of date computers have become a waste management problem and it’s only a matter of time before free wireless internet and trashed, wireless-capable PCs intersect to bring any inclined individual to the net.

Most technologies are initially exclusive to the affluent, such as reading/writing, books, CD players, whatever, but then trickle down to be adopted by the masses. Advances such as the printing press (and perhaps now WiMAX or other large range wireless tech) help bring the price floor down to the working, and even non-working, class. This is where technology can have a transformative effect, like Dickens bringing indictments of oppressive government systems to the masses by selling his monthly numbers for six pence.

The problem is that for these sorts of changes, the cost is not the only obstacle. A certain literacy is also needed to make use of what is otherwise a useless box of plastic and metal chips on the sidewalk. But as we see with Dickens or books in general, the saturation comes first and then the skills to make use of it.

One good thing that’s come from the dot com boom is that companies now see the advantage to anticipating demand. There is no real demand for free municipal wireless; people think it’s cool but no one is foaming at the mouth. But companies like Earthlink and Google see the potential in capturing the ambivalent user. Like TV, few people miss its presence in a bar, but if it’s there, they’ll watch it.