Abstracts taken from: 23 Things They Dont Tell You About Capitalism, By Ha-Joon Chang

The recent revolution in communication technologies –better known as the Internet, has led to the ‘death of distance’.  This technological revelation defines the age in which we live in today that dismisses the fine borders between nations, countries, companies, firms’ and individuals through speed communication and posing the need to be more flexible in our efforts to compete in a liberalization of markets.

The internet revolution has not revolutionized as much as the washing machine and other household appliances, which by vastly reducing the amount of work needed for household chores, allowed women to enter into the economic (male dominated) labor market and virtually abolished professionals like domestic service.

Domestic service better known to many as maids have for long (and especially in Latin America – as the book presents) been a norm until the introduction of electrical household appliances such as the washing machine have come to be more than revolutionary for many countries. We can clearly state that with the invention of the washing machine, vacuum cleaners, gas/electric stoves etc. have alternatively relived time and effort and to an extreme extent money from what domestic service used to be. The emergence of household appliances, as well as electricity, piped water and piped gas, has totally transformed the way women, and consequently men, live. It has made it possible for more (married) women to join the labour market and in turn raised their status at home and in society, thus also reducing preference for male children and increasing investment in female education, which than further increases female labour market participation. All of this constitute really powerful changes. This is greater revolution than countries reaching each other through small spaced mechanisms as the Internet, Facebook, Twitter, Google etc. and globalization is by far greater than this.

The fascination with the Internet by people in rich countries has moved the international community to worry about the “digital divide” between rich and poor countries. This has led companies and charitable organizations as well as individuals to donate money to developing countries to buy computer equipment and Internet facilities. Perhaps giving money for those less fashionable things such as gidding wells, extending electricity grids and making more affordable washing machines would have improved people’s lives more than giving every child a laptop or setting up rural internet services.

As a result many people have come to believe that whatever change is happening today is the result of monumental technological progress. However, if we let our perspective be distorted by the recent technological revolution, we will not see what has determined the degree of globalization (in other words national openness) is politics, rather than technology. This hopefully illustrated with the comparison of the Internet to the humble washing machine.