Tom Barnett has a link up on mobile phones revolutionizing third-world backwaters

Once the toys of rich yuppies, mobile phones have evolved in a few short years to become tools of economic empowerment for the world's poorest people. These phones compensate for inadequate infrastructure, such as bad roads and slow postal services, allowing information to move more freely, making markets more efficient and unleashing entrepreneurship. All this has a direct impact on economic growth: an extra ten phones per 100 people in a typical developing country boosts GDP growth by 0.8 percentage points . . ..

That's all great news. But how many cell phones are designed in Africa by Africans? How many African electrical engineers are there? How many people know what a fast fourier transform is? What an A/D is? How to design a patch antenna at microwave frequencies?

See, the thing is that all of these "revolutions" in the third world are completely dependent on the white people who've developed these technologies for the past 500 years. Fourier, Moore, Maxwell, Shannon, Nyquist, Cooley, and Tukey were all white electrical engineers and scientists who developed the fundamental technology that is now used in cell phones. How much, if any, have Africans contributed to these sciences since they've gotten more "connectivity?"

Nothing, of course. As long as whites and Asians are around to develop new technologies, an idiot can use them, and yes, they will increase productivity. But what happens when such people aren't around anymore?

Now that the white man has been run out of Africa, China is colonizing it. They don't see much potential in the African worker, apparently, as they have brought in a million Chinese laborers.

One item that makes the Chinese substantively different than the West is that they typically build infrastructure; various sources (I can’t seem to find a solid one) say that over 1 million Chinese are working today in Africa, mostly on these types of projects. It is simply amazing that the Chinese are importing labor into Africa; surplus labor is about all that Africa has in abundance.

Yes, amazing. Or not so amazing. How long will that infrastructure last once the Chinese are gone?

What all this "connectivity" and technology is bringing, if anything, is unchecked population growth in Africa, which will only amount to a Malthusian trap once white busybodies lose interest in going there to give money and hand out vaccines. I see some of these shows on National Geographic where a parent-like aging white person is standing amidst a village of sub-saharan Africans and offering them instructions on how to use a mosquito net over their beds like they're little children. Cognitively, they may be. Nevertheless, I find the behavior of whites treating sub-saharan Africans like children to be incredibly patronizing.