Wireless Access, Too

The small restaurant I had lunch at today has wireless internet access. Mind you, this was not in a Sheraton hotel, but in the crowded, narrow alley filled with tailors, shoemakers, and other little types of businesses--that is, a typical developing world alley.

I don't normally travel with my laptop, since I like to go light, so it's no benefit to me. But it clearly was to the two patrons checking their email and scanning the news.

Once upon a time I thought that capitalism was bad...but then I hadn't yet studied economics or travelled to Damascus. I am more and more amazed all the time at the power of markets and the entrpreneurial spirit, and at the ways the market works to the benefit of average people.

Livin' it Up on the Internet

I'm amazed, but only partially, by the number of internt cafes available. My friend, Maher, said before I came that he had heard that one opened up in Damascus. What an undercount. There're 4 million people in Damascus, it's a big city, so I wouldnt't try to guess how many there are, but I haven't had trouble finding them, just as I didn't in Dubai.

Consider the economics of it. Buy a half-dozen to a dozen used computers,a few chairs and desks, and that's your capital investment. It's really, really cheap. Heck, I could get this many computers for free from my college, and Goodwill won't take them, so the market for used PCs of that sort has to be a buyer's market.

Then you rent a small shop space. Fortunately, to serve the clientele you're most likely to get, you can do that in a place where the rent won't be high... a place where backpacking travelers (the luxury hotels provide internet access to guests) and either immigrant workers or families of workers who have emigrated cluster. And young people, but not rich young people or they'll have it at home.

And for that small capital investment, a person can open their own business, becoming an entrepreneur and improving their life. Maybe after a few years they sell it and move up to a more lucrative business, or maybe they save and open another internet cafe.

And this is how the developing world will develop, if their governments and well-intentioned but misguided development agencies will leave them alone.

My Inner Economist Screams

This morning at the Dubai airport I was at first delighted to see that they had free internet...for about 2 seconds, before my inner economist hollered at me. And then I thought, there will be an undersupply/overdemand. And sure enough, I had to wait in line. But it's not just that the free-ness created more demand; it also caused people to linger longer, further delaying other would-be users.

That was the overdemand side. The undersupply came in the form of non-working terminals--the first three I tried to access! (Of course I got to them first, they were the first to open up because no one lingered at them.) The grubby little storefront internet cafes near the Gold Souk in Dubai, which were not free (although at 85 cents an hour it was almost like free to an American) were in better operating condition--all their terminals worked. Of course they were doing a booming business, and a down terminal meant a loss of revenue.

The only surprising thing about the event was that I actually bought in to the idea of free internet service for a moment. I guess my inner economist was still drowsy.

And now I sit in an internet cafe that is right beside my nicely old-fashioned hotel in the old city district of Damascus, again blogging effortlessly at a pittance per hour. The concept of government providing for the public good is so compelling, but it just turns out so often that greedy individuals just manage to provide it so much better. "Invisible hand" indeed.

The Cost of Blogging in Dubai

The neighborhood around the Gold Souk in Dubai is one big souk (market) itself, with the ground floor of nearly all buildings given over to shops. There are probably thousands of shops, with attendant workers and others providing services to them, and a lot of these people living in the apartments above the shops. It's the kind of place "nice" tourists come for a couple hours to shop, then run away to the Hilton Hotel. But I'm staying here, and my little hotel (which seems to cater mostly to Africans) doesn't have internet for guests. But in a neighborhood like this, where so many of the workers are immigrants, an internet cafe is a certainty, and sure enough there are at least three I've found within a few blocks of my hotel.

The cost is 3 Dirhams an hour--about 83 cents. That's affordable blogging indeed.