Internet Governance on a Dollar a Day is forthcoming in Information Polity. Globally, around one billion people live on a dollar a day. About 44 percent –nearly half– of the World’s population lives on less than two dollars a day. This paper examines the importance of "Internet governance" to such people. Arguments over generic top-level domain names might seem of somewhat esoteric interest to the subsistence farmer. Indeed, if Internet governance is defined in the narrow sense of the management of TLDs (Top Level Domains) and root zone files, it is surely of little importance to poor people. However, given the nature both of technology and of poor people’s demands for information and communication, a broader definition of Internet governance does spill over into issues of importance to all, including the world’s poorest. Furthermore, thinking in terms of "information governance" may make more sense in an increasingly converged sector, and issues of information governance are of undoubted importance to poor people. In turn, this suggests priorities for governments attempting to improve the lives of the poor through increasing information flows.
Charles Kenny
Books, Papers and Articles
Charles Kenny writes about global development — what’s working, what isn’t, and how the world can do better. An economist who spent fifteen years at the World Bank, he is now a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, DC.
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Young People and ICTs in Developing Countries is forthcoming in Information Technology for Development. The paper is co-authored with Naomi Halewood. Young people are often ‘first adopters’ of new technologies, and this appears to be the case with ICTs. Evidence from the developing world suggests that young people have widespread access to broadcast technologies and the telephone, but more limited access to the Internet. And even amongst young people, Internet use lags considerably behind Internet access. ICTs, and in particular the Internet, provide opportunities for employment, but it should be noted that there are limits to the economic impact of the Internet in developing countries. Broadcast technologies can be particularly useful tool in both formal and continuing education, the Internet may have a significant role in vocational and further education. There are potential social costs of ICT use amongst young people, but these can be mitigated. Youth-specific policy recommendations focus on the greater use of ICTs in education and content control.
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Putting Life Back into Miracles is an unpublished short paper. If you type "Middle East Miracle" into Google, you get a paltry 151 hits, compared to 29,000 for "East Asian Miracle." And yet despite a grim economic performance, between 1962 and 2002 life expectancy in the Middle East and North Africa increased from around 48 years to 69 years –the strongest growth in any region’s health in history. It might, then, be worth questioning the assumption that economic growth is the only development grail we need quest after, and examining a wider range of miracles (and tragedies) might help uncover a range of different causal factors for success in a broader development effort.
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Toward Universal Telephone Access Market progress and progress beyond the market was published in Telecommunications Policy vol. 31. It was written with Rym Keremane. The last 10 years have seen an explosion in access to telephone services worldwide based on rapid technology advance in increasingly competitive markets. The mobile phone has driven expansion in subscribers and access, especially in the developing world. This paper estimates global mobile footprint coverage based on 2002 data and calculates that as much as 77 percent of the world’s population may live in an area covered by a mobile signal. Nonetheless, many people remain without access to telephony. The paper estimates the maximum likely cost in terms of cross subsidy within the industry and outside financing for achieving universal access using competitively awarded subsidies to private providers in a reformed market. This upper-end cost is estimated at $5.7 billion, with costs that could not be supplied by a reasonable tax on existing providers (and so required from outside the sector) estimated at $1.8 billion.
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Is Africa a Failure? is an unpublished short paper. The usual way to refer to the performance of African countries over the forty or so years since independence is as a ‘crisis,’ or even a ‘rot.’ In these versions of Africa’s recent history, there is but one thing to argue over –who is to blame. This does, however, raise the question, ‘at what has Africa failed?’ The answer for parts of the continent is clear –but these cases do not make up the majority (or even a sizeable minority) of the region. In many important respects –not least health– Africa’s post-colonial record remains one of considerable success.
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The OECS and Regional Telecommunications Reform, co-authered with Donnie DeFreitas and Robert Schware, was published in info, Vol. 3, No.3. The Impact of Reform on Telecommunications Prices and Services in the Countries of the OECS, co-authored with Robert Schware and Eliud Williams, is forthcoming in the Journal of Information Technology for Development. Five member countries of the Organization of East Caribbean States (OECS) — St Lucia, Dominica, Grenada, St Vincent and the Grenadines, and St Kitts and Nevis — are undergoing a unique experiment in telecommunications liberalization. The reform has two interesting features. First, the reform effort was dramatically enhanced because of a legal ruling in one of the member countries that monopoly telecommunications provision is unconstitutional; and, second, the islands hope that a large part of the functions of a telecommunications regulator will be carried out at the regional rather than the national level. Reforms began to show results when the current monopoly service provider slashing the prices of international calls. Prices have fallen considerably further after the introduction of a regulated price cap.
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A Note on the Ethical Implications of the Stern Review is an unpublished short paper. The Stern Review adopts two interesting elements in its calculation of the costs and benefits of climate change mitigation. First is a ‘global welfarist’ approach that values the utility of the World’s people (now and into the future) equally, and sets global utility maximization as the correct goal for policy. Second is an assumption of a declining marginal utility to income. Consistent application of the ‘global welfarist’ approach and the declining marginal utility of income together would demand an urgent process of global income redistribution. Over the long term, this might see the richest ten percent of the World’s population facing an average redistributive tax rate in the region of 82 percent. A version will be published in the Journal of Environment and Development.
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Measuring and Reducing the Impact of Corruption in Infrastructure was issued as a working paper in December 2006. The paper examines what we can say about the extent and impact of corruption in infrastructure in developing countries using existing evidence. It looks at different approaches to estimating the extent of corruption and reports on the results of such studies. It suggests that there is considerable evidence that most existing perceptions measures appear to be very weak proxies for the actual extent of corruption in the infrastructure sector, largely (but inaccurately) measuring petty rather than grand corruption. Existing survey evidence is more reliable, but limited in extent and still subject to sufficient uncertainty that it should not be used as a tool for differentiating countries in terms of access to infrastructure finance or appropriate policy models. The paper discusses evidence for the relative costs of corruption impacts and suggests that a focus on bribe payments as the indicator of the costs of corruption in infrastructure may be misplaced. It draws some conclusions regarding priorities for infrastructure anti-corruption research and activities in projects, in particular regarding disaggregated and actionable indicators of weak governance and corruption. A revised version will be published in the Journal of Development Studies.
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Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Utility: Happiness in Philosophical and Economic Thought is being published in October, 2006. The book is co-authored with my father, Anthony Kenny.
Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Utility relates age-old philosophical discussions of the nature of a worth-while life to the recent growth of interest among economists in criteria for quality of life. Reflection on the philosophical tradition suggests that there are three key elements in the notion of a good life: welfare, contentment, and dignity. Welfare is capable of objective measurement in terms of such elements as food intake, disease level, expectation of life and so on. Contentment is also measurable, to a more controversial degree, by means of questionnaires eliciting self-ascriptions of subjective well being. Dignity is the most difficult of all the elements of well-being to determine and quantify, but it is related to measures of civil rights, economic and gender equality and measures of the quality of employment. The book discusses what philosophers and economists have had to say about the nature and causes of welfare, dignity and contentment. On the basis of this analysis we draw conclusions for national and international policies.
Here are the front matter, Chapter One and Chapter Four. Here is the publisher’s blurb. Chapter summaries are available in the Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Utility topic page (look left). Chapters one, three, five and seven are philosophical in nature and were written by Anthony Kenny, even-numbered chapters are empirical and were written by Charles Kenny. Anthony Kenny wrote an article about the book in the Scotsman, November 30th and Samual Brittan discussed it in the Financial Times, December 15th. It was reviewed online here and here, in the Journal of Economic Issues (September 2007), the Journal of Law, Philosophy and Culture (Spring, 2007) and the Journal of Markets and Morality (Spring, 2008).
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Chapter One of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Utility discusses the history of the philosophy of happiness.
In the light of what Aristotle says, we might offer ‘worthwhile life’ as the most appropriate translation of his word ‘eudaimonia’. For Aristotle, this ‘happiness’ must be an end rather than a means and it must be some good, or set of goods, that in itself makes life worth living. Aristotle suggests that there are three lives that might be classified as happy: a life of pleasure, a life of politics, and a life of study. In his lesser known, but more professional treatise, the Eudemian Ethics, he claims that the happy life must combine the features of all three of these elements.
Nature, training, learning, luck and divine favour all play a part in the acquisition of happiness according to Aristotle. In the centuries following Aristotle’s life, each of these elements has been seized upon by one or other later thinker as crucial.
All the thinkers considered in this chapter regard happiness both as a motive in advance of action, and as a benefit resulting from action, but from there opinions diverge. Different philosophers link these two features of happiness in different directions. Bentham and his followers start from utility as a satisfactory goal, and seek the means to achieve it. Aristotelians start from our desire to have a good life, and ask what kind of end state will possess the features that are built into our desire.
For many centuries the dominant account was that supreme happiness was a gift of God, obtainable only through divine grace. For Augustine and Aquinas, happiness demanded, in addition to moral virtues like courage and temperance and intellectual excellences such as knowledge and understanding, the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love, and these were gifts of God that might be freely given or denied. The happiness that was the reward of these virtues could be fully enjoyed only in the next life; on the other hand the imperfect happiness that attached to a life of virtue in this world was compatible with an almost complete lack of worldly goods. By comparison with Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, the utilitarians were much more optimistic about the possibility of achieving true happiness in the present life (which, for most of them, was the only life).
Again, while everyone agrees that happiness can motivate action, there are some who think that happiness is a necessary goal (every action is consciously or unconsciously aimed at happiness) while others think of it only as a possible motive, and not necessarily an ultimate goal. Related to this, Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas all founded morality on a basis that is ultimately self-centred. To be sure, Aristotle admitted that a happy man would need friends, and that even a philosopher could philosophise better in company. Again, Augustine and Aquinas taught that we must love our neighbour, as we are commanded to do by the God whose vision we seek. But in each case the concern for the welfare of others is presented as a means to an ultimate goal of self-fulfilment. The first philosopher in the Christian tradition to break with this eudaimonism was the fourteenth century Oxford Franciscan, John Duns Scotus.
The disagreement between Aquinas and Scotus on the link between happiness and morality was replayed, in a different key, at the end of the eighteenth century between Bentham and Kant. Bentham, like Aquinas, made happiness the central concept of morality. Kant, like Scotus, thought that morality needed a different basis: he called it the sense of duty.
‘The greatest happiness of the greatest number’ is an impressive slogan: but when probed it turns out to be riddled with ambiguity. The first question to be raised is ‘greatest number of what?’ A second question about the principle of utility is this: should individuals, or politicians, in following the greatest happiness principle attempt to exercise control over the number of candidates for happiness we have to strike a difficult balance between quantity of happiness and quantity of people. Third, if I am, in fact, predetermined in every action to aim at maximising my own pleasure, what point is there in telling me that I am obliged to maximise the common good? Happiness, Kant argues in his Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, cannot be the ultimate purpose of morality:
Suppose now that for a being possessed of reason and will the real purpose of nature were his preservation, his welfare, or in a word his happiness. In that case nature would have hit on a very bad arrangement by choosing reason in the creature to carry out this purpose. For all the actions he has to perform with this end in view, and the whole rule of his behaviour, would have been mapped out for him far more accurately by instinct; and the end in question could have been maintained far more surely by instinct than it ever can be by reason .
Because of the overwhelming influence of Kant, many moral philosophers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries lost interest in the study of happiness. The utilitarians, of course, continued to pay homage to the concept, but their interests began to diverge in two different directions. The philosophers among them were mainly interested in the relationship between utilitarianism and other moral intuitions, while the economists sought to explore what methods were available to measure utility.
In the Twentieth Century, the behaviourist account of emotions and feelings was a crude oversimplification that did not long remain popular with philosophers and psychologists. It lasted long enough, however, to infect the thought of economists who wished to offer an operational definition of utility. They sought for measurable behaviour that would constitute happiness in the way that, for Watson, crying, cooing, and gurgling constituted more basic emotions. Surely, in economic terms, the behaviour most indicative of satisfaction is the set of actual choices that a person makes in his market transactions. So economists such as Robbins and Samuelson developed the theory that utility was nothing other than the revealed preferences of those who purchased goods or services.
If we reflect upon the different accounts of happiness given in philosophical, psychological, and economic tradition, we may conclude that there are three distinct elements to be identified in human well-being. We may call them welfare, dignity and contentment. Welfare, in the most obvious sense of material welfare, consists in the satisfaction of one’s animal needs, for food, drink, shelter and the other things that conduce to bodily flourishing. Welfare is the least controversial element in well-being. Almost all philosophers who have considered the topic have considered it either a constituent or a necessary condition of happiness.
Dignity is a much more complicated notion to define. We may say initially that it involves the control of one’s own destiny and the ability to live a life of one’s choice. But in addition, it seems to be necessary for total well-being that one’s chosen way of life should have worth in itself, and should enjoy the respect of others. Contentment is what is expressed by self-ascriptions of happiness. It is not so much a feeling or a sensation as an attitude or state of mind; but of the elements of well-being it is the one that is closest to the utilitarian idea of happiness.
The three items that we have identified correspond to the unalienable human rights whose existence the American Declaration of Independence regarded as a self-evident truth: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. ‘Life’, broadly interpreted, includes the necessities that we have entitled ‘welfare’. ‘Liberty’ is the foundation of a career of dignity. And the ‘happiness’ that was to be pursed was conceived of by the founding fathers as a state of contentment, such as was soon to be given the name of ‘utility’.
