For individuals in business and small firms, however, there is no contest between strong and weak links. Weak links are the way to innovation, and possibly to a jackpot.
And, as we move through the twenty-first century, weak links are becoming more important. There are more hubs and strong links, but even more weak links, and the latter are becoming relatively more influential. As the world shrinks, as the six or seven billion individuals on the planet connect to each other more and more, the number of permutations, the proliferation of weak links, continues to multiply. Power and wealth follow this track. A few individuals–the superconnectors, the super-innovators–are making fortunes and beginning to challenge corporations and governments, and their earlier near monopoly of power and philanthropy. Power and wealth may be concentrated, but the concentration is decentralised, split into narrow niches that often did not exist before. The identity of the winners, over a generation or more, is fragile.
The saving grace of the network world–its human face, its unpredictability, its ultimate bias in favour of individuals, even within the densest networks–is weak links, which counterbalance the reliable, ordered and sometimes oppressive domain of strong hubs and strong links. Weak links bring us into concert with unlikely bedfellows and exotic ideas. Weak links allow free will and new creations to triumph. And, as we are about to see, if weak links are not allowed to form, human life becomes nasty, brutish and short.
CHAPTER TWELVE
POVERTY, URBAN RENEWAL AND GANGSTERS
Can networks reduce poverty?
The lower one’s class stratum, the greater the frequency of strong links.
Mark Granovetter
Gazipur, Bangladesh, 2002
Icy water, clouded grey with silt, tumbles from the Himalayas into the tributaries of the Ganges. The river widens and the water slows, in time joining the Jamuna and Meghna rivers in a great delta. The sediment settles in a rich alluvial plain, comprising a large part of the country of Bangladesh. One hundred and forty million people live here, half of them on less than a dollar a day. Toiling on small rural landholdings, two-thirds of Bangladeshis work on farms. Despite this great effort and the fertile earth, the country cannot feed itself. Bangladesh is over-populated, suffers damaging monsoons and has inadequate infrastructure and public services.
Two hours from the capital, Dhaka, at the back of a pharmacy in the town of Gazipur, past crooked shelves stacked with medicines, soaps, condoms and household sundries, sits Jamirun Nesa. She is the village superconnector. She’s used a loan from the Grameen Bank to create a simple connection business that lets Gazipur reach the rest of the world, which in turn places her at a busy crossroads. Using a mobile phone purchased for something approaching the average annual income, a TV-aerial-like contraption at the top of a bamboo pole to improve reception, and a car battery for back-up electricity when the mains supply fails, she runs the village phone booth.
People line up to talk to friends and relatives, make and receive simple mobile payments, and place texts and calls that could make or break their finances for that year. Before the arrival of Jamirun’s phone, farmers had no idea where the market was for their produce. They would often have to transport it to distant places without knowing the price they would be paid, or if there was a price at all. Warning of a storm would come with mercilessly little time, if any, to protect their harvest or prepare shelter. And it was hard to find out which were the best crops to grow, or what to do if a harvest was struggling or blighted. Time was wasted, and food spoiled, until the weak links radiating from the back of the pharmacy helped change it all.93
Jeffrey Sachs, a professor of economics at Columbia University and director of the Earth Institute, predicted in his 2005 book The End of Poverty that extreme privation could be ended by the year 2025.94 Information technologies can connect us in markets and social networks, helping us to share our knowledge and cooperate to solve our problems. Jamirun needs no convincing. In 2002, she earned close to a thousand US dollars running her connection business–about three times the country’s GDP per capita. But the economic benefit that distant links have brought to her region is many times greater–time saved for productive tasks, harvests sold for better prices, the introduction of high-value cash crops, less spoilage and storm damage. Jamirun’s status has also risen markedly. ‘Before, people in the community wouldn’t talk to me, but they do now,’ she says. ‘I get more respect from my husband and family.’ And while this vibrant little business will not last for ever, as mobile phones start to become more commonplace, Jamirun will have a new house and a chicken farm before the party’s over.
Bangladesh, 2009
Seven years on, one in three Bangladeshis owns a mobile phone. In other developing countries, penetration of phones is roughly similar. Almost none of the world’s foremost telecommunications analysts saw this coming fifteen years ago, even though cellular telephony was all the rage in the developed world at the time. After all, how many phones were you going to sell when they cost half a year’s wages? People in rich countries neither understood nor predicted just how compelling the economic benefits of weak links, via mobile telephony, would be for the developing world.
Bangladesh is now making major strides towards meeting its food needs.
Can the poor find their own route out of their situation, or does guidance have to come from outside? And, either way, is there really a general solution to poverty? Some conservative writers claim that the ‘underclass’ in rich societies has little or no chance of bettering itself without what amounts to moral reformation–kicking drug habits, embracing two-parent families, a sense of personal responsibility. In his closely reasoned and highly praised book Wealth and Poverty, originally published in 1981, George Gilder says:
The only dependable route from poverty is always work, family, and faith…the effect of marriage…is to increase the work effort of men by about half…it is manifest that the maintenance of families is the key factor in reducing poverty…The key to lower-class life in contemporary America is that unrelated individuals [single people]…are so numerous and conspicuous that they set the tone for the entire community. Their congregation in ghettos, moreover, magnifies greatly their impact on the black poor…The short-sighted outlook of poverty stems largely from the breakdown of family responsibilities among fathers. The lives of the poor, too often, are governed by the rhythms of tension and release that characterize the sexual experience of young single men.
95
Liberal commentators, on the other hand, blame society or the welfare system for locking the poor into a life without hope. Back in the 1970s, sociologist Carol Stack did pioneering field-work in one of the poorest communities in the US Midwest, spending most of her time with the residents in their homes and on their streets. She concluded that the ascent from poverty was virtually impossible: ‘[Mere] reform of existing [welfare] programs’, she wrote, ‘can never be expected to eliminate an impoverished class in America. The effect of such programs is that they maintain the existence of…a sizable but docile impoverished class.’96
Poverty, it seems, has too many explanations and too many causes, but too few solutions. This is an endless, inconclusive and depressing debate. Gilder and Stack seem to agree on only one thing: poverty will remain intractable. ‘There will be poverty in America for centuries to come,’ Gilder states flatly.97