Jerry Michalski (geek watcher, former Release 1.0 editor, conversational hacker) is giving a really interesting talk about deviant thinkers – outsiders. He gives us a rogue’s gallery of intellectual heretics, from seemingly unrelated fields and documents their individual heresies:

Psychotherapist Alice Miller: Abuse is epidemic and people don’t believe survivors.

Dogme 95 diector Lars Von Trier: Artifice diminishes movies.

Founder of the Quakers, George Fox: We don’t need intermediation in our relationship with God.

Richard Stallman: We should be able to share software.

Jerry sees a common thread through these outsiders – they’re all pointing to an implicit societal message: “We Don’t Trust You”. We don’t trust you to self-educate, to design, to enjoy authentic art, to minister to one another, to create collective goods or to know things you can’t measure.

Jerry’s interested in what happens when we start from a position of trust – when you believe that you’re dealing with “users”, not “consumers”, when you trust openness to be a competitive advantage, not a threat. Jerry believes that open content, tools and processes aren’t just good business practice, but have other critical values, releasing human energy.

I think Jerry’s insight is a useful one, and I’m interested to see what happens when he’s got some more time to use this notion of deep trust as a way to analyze software and economies… though I don’t quite understand what Jerry means by unlocking human energy…

A question I offered: if these thinkers are united by a belief that we had to trust others, why were they so dogmatic in their methods? Jerry’s got an excellent start of an answer – it’s not healthy – psychologically or otherwise – to be a leader. While the insight about trust is primary, other problems with being a leader make it hard for that leader to trust followers.

Very interested to see where Jerry goes with these ideas.

Mart Laar‘s a funny guy. He introduces Estonia to us as “one of the countries where Santa Claus lives”, and gives the nation’s history by listing, in rapid order, the nations that have invaded and conquered Estonia: “Germans, Swedes, Poles, Swedes again, Russians, Swedes, Germans, then Russians for a long time.”

He walks us through Estonia’s guerilla resistance to Soviet dominance with passion and humor (which only seems right, when you realize that he was a history teacher before becoming Prime Minister), up to nonviolent resistance against the Soviets with a human chain across the Baltics, as people held hands and demanded freedom for the Baltics.

Estonia gained independence… and immediately inherited the wind. In 1992 – when Laar first took office – there was 1000% inflation, and a 30% annual fall in employment… unsurprising because 92% of Estonia’s economy had been based on trade with Russia.

As he tells the story, Laar had no idea what he was doing, economically – “I was a blank paper” – and was therefore open to trying techniques that just shouldn’t work. So he picked up conservative economist Milton Friedman’s “Free to Choose” and followed the advice in the book. This meant a focus on monetary reforms (eliminating the black market), opening markets (he eliminated all trade barriers) and flat taxes.

Whether or not Friedman’s prescription would work for every nation, it seemed to work very well for Estonia. The nation is growing at 6-7% a year, and 40% of the nation’s exports are high tech (including fun technology like Skype and Kazaa.) The Heritage Foundation lists the country as one of the most economically “free”, and it’s sometimes referred to as “the jewel of the Baltics”. Internet adoption is a very impressive 70%, and Laar shows us evidence of 100% paper-free eGovernment.

He gives a compelling talk. It’s a wonderful reminder that the distinctions of left and right we make in US politics don’t always translate across international borders. I tend to think of political revolutionaries as coming from the left. But here’s a revolutionary with Ronald Reagan (who he acknowledges was crazy, but admired nevertheless) and Milton Friedman as patron saints. It’s a good challenge for folks like me who tend to assume that the progressives are the folks on the right track…

Ingo Gunther is speaking as part of the “panel” I’m on at PUSH 2005 (it’s unclear whether the three of us will actually speak to one another, as we’re all running long…). He opens with some interesting statements about “the two big modernisms”: capitalism and communism, and his sense that “supercapitalism” has actually delivered quite a bit, as far as reducing poverty. His sense is that the more the future delivers, the less it’s embraced.

He’s got an extraordinary set of images from globes he’s built, visualizing interesting different sorts of data. One has nations marked with life expectancies, another distorts Japan into a continent to show it’s economic impact. THere’s a beautiful map that shows one with only international waters, another that shows only manmade borders.

They’re gorgeous, and extremely powerful. Looking forward to looking through them at length online – there’s 300 of them, and they’re blowing my mind. The best so far – a map where some countries have been replaced by the names of international corporations that have the same economic strength. Mongolia becomes Revlon, Kazakstan becomes Viacom…

Iqbal Quadir, one of the founders of Grameen Phone – the remarkable Bengali phone company that puts cellphones into the hands of women entrepreneurs – is speaking at PUSH 2005. He starts by reminding us that Bangladesh was producing 1/3rd of all European textiles in 1757, and that Dhaka dictated terms of trade to Europeans. So what happened? It’s not just colonialism – Bangladesh has been free of colonialism for 60 years. Why is growth so elusive, for Bangladesh, and for the rest of developing nations?

Iqbal points to a “top-down approach” favored by the World Bank and others… and notes that it puts power into the hands of authority, not into the hands of people. The US didn’t develop this way – technoloogical empowerment from below led to success in developed nations. Technology can amplify voices, make it possible for individuals to have a voice that gets heard by central authorities.

As an example of top-down and bottom-up, Iqbal points towards the explosive growth of mobile phones, versus stagnation in landline growth in Africa. The fixed lines are an example of a top-down approach, the mobile lines of more agile, bottom up approaches.

Iqbal’s story behind Grameen Phone goes back in time, to the war between East and West Pakistan. (East Pakistan later became Bangladesh.) To avoid the conflict, Iqbal’s family moved away from the city, and Iqbal grew up in a very rural part of Bangladesh. He remembers wasting a day walking to a nearby village to try to buy medicine, and discovering the pharmacist was out. Thinking about computer networks twenty years later, he realized that “connectivity equals productivity”. ITU research supports this contention – in low GDP per capita countries, econmic impact of each phone line is quite high. It gets lower as GDP per capita increases.

Thinking about classical economics, Iqbal wonders how Bangladesh can follow Adam Smith’s maxim, “Specialization leads to productivity.” For people in an economy to specialize, they need to depend on one another – if I’m going to stop farming and become a basketweaver, I need to rely on someone who’s going to continue farming and growing my food. Dependability needs connectivity. So connectivity can lead to specialization and to productivity.

Why are rich economies spending more and more money on communications, given that the cost of phone lines has gone down? We’re communicating more.

In Bangladesh, 1993, there were only 2 phones per 1000 people, and virtually none in rural areas. There was a $500 connection fee, and a 5-10 year waiting period. Most phones were analog, and many didn’t work. How much brainpower was being wasted by virtue of wasting productivity because of an absence of connectivity?

Iqbal found himself challenging some myths about economic development and the poor. Can shared costs overcome the problems of low individual buying power? Can the value of purchasing a productivity tool make it possible for people to “overinvest” in communication technologies, because these technologies can increase income?

What’s the real problem with digital divides in Bangladesh? The lack of other infrastructures. There are no credit checks, rpads for repairmen, banks to collect bills, schools for the children of workers. Grameen Bank looked like a solution to a lot of these infrastructural problems. Would it make sense to put GSM towers within Grameen offices?

Grameen had 1138 branches in Bangladesh, 2.3 million borrowers, 94% female, with $33 million lent per month. The core model – a woman borrows money from the bank, buys a cow, sells the milk and repays the loan. So why can’t a cellphone be a cow?

There was a great deal of skepticism about the idea, so Iqbal moved home and started a company. He eventually convinced Telenor – the Norwegian national telephone company – to help fund the project and provide technical expertise. With Grameen’s distribution and Telenor’s technology, the business has grown radically, and now covers the majority of the nation – it’s by far the largest company in Bangladesh. By 2004, 95,000 women are selling access to phones that they own in 50,000 villages. And Grameen Phone provides $200 million a year to the government in taxes. Net income in 2004 was $125 million. And each phone owner is making about $700 a year, which is an excellent income in Bangladesh.

Iqbal’s lessons: