Connectivity is key to transforming economies and driving progress. (It’s a major theme of my 2023 book  The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised.) Think of the American economy as a $25 trillion living supercomputer, a vast network of human-powered nodes—companies, cities, governments, and universities—all linked together. 

This wondrous, techno-organic entity’s primary purpose is to create valuable products that embody imagination and knowledge. Countries with greater computational capacity and denser networks can produce sophisticated goods like iPhones or AI chatbots, while those with less may only manage basic commodities. 

To optimize this system, public policy must help foster educated, healthy individuals who can generate and acquire knowledge, connecting through diverse networks to innovate and drive economic growth. Embracing pro-complexity, pro-network, pro-connection economics is critical to building a prosperous, opportunity-filled future.

Evidence that I’m on the right track can be found in “Broadband Internet Access, Economic Growth, and Wellbeing,” a new NBER working paper from American University scholars Kathryn R. Johnson and Claudia Persic. Looking at the huge increase in access to high-speed, broadband internet in the US between 2000 and 2008, the researchers—using data on broadband internet availability at the county level—find some pretty encouraging impacts. Among them:

• Counties with increased broadband access saw reductions in their poverty and unemployment rates.
• Zip codes that gained broadband access saw increases in the number of employees and firms.
• Positive economic impacts, like lower unemployment and poverty rates, were strongest for adults between the ages of 25 and 64, which are typically considered the prime working years. (This finding helps explain another one: When 10 percent more people in a county get access to high-speed broadband internet, the number of suicides in that county goes down by about one percent.)

From the paper’s conclusion: 

The primary implication of our findings is that the positive mental health downstream effects from the economic benefits of the roll out of broadband internet outweighed the potential negative mental health consequences of broadband internet. This supports the current federal policy goal of supporting and promoting the continued proliferation of broadband internet to areas that currently do not have access to fast, high quality, broadband internet.

The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act included some $70 billion to improve access to high-speed broadband internet. AEI has been closely monitoring and evaluating these efforts through its Broadband Barometer Project: “The goal is simple yet ambitious: to maximize the value of each dollar invested in state broadband programs and avoid the pitfalls of previous federal initiatives.”

The post Broad Benefits of Broadband appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.