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Can a phone be a cow? It could in 1990s Bangladesh. This was the insight of a small number of mobile phone market pioneers who helped catalyze the spread of the greatest technological revolution in human history. Listen as George Mason University economist Philip Auerswald speaks to EconTalk’s Russ Roberts about how the extension of connectivity to traditionally excluded populations led to wide-scale transformations in productivity. They discuss the role of little-known entrepreneurs such as Iqbal Quadir and innovators like Claude Shannon in bringing the mobile phone to the entire world.
Other topics include William Nordhaus’s paper on the cost of illumination as a powerful metric of human progress, Schumpeter’s notion of innovation as new combinations, and what Auerswald calls the most important question the field of economics can ask: How much of human progress is inevitable, and how much depends on the determination of remarkable individuals?
The full transcript will be available here.
Resources
Acemoglu, Daron, and Robinson, James A. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty.New York: Crown Business, 2012.
Arthur, W. Brian. Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.
Auerswald, Philip. A Phone Is a Cow: How Pioneers of the Mobile Revolution Helped Millions Lift Themselves Out of Poverty. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2025.
Auerswald, Philip. “Philip Auerswald.” George Mason University Schar School of Policy and Government.
Auerswald, Philip. “Philip Auerswald on the Rise of Populism.” Interview by Russ Roberts. EconTalk, March 4, 2024.
Baumol, William J. The Microtheory of Innovative Entrepreneurship. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010.
Bush, Vannevar. “As We May Think.” The Atlantic, September 10, 1945.
Hazlett, Thomas W. “We Could Have Had Cellphones Four Decades Earlier.” Reason, June 11, 2017.
Homer. The Iliad. Translated by Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin Books, 1998.
Kauffman, Stuart. “The ‘Adjacent Possible’—and How It Explains Human Innovation.” TEDx Talk. August 28, 2024.
Mullins, Brody, and Luke Mullins. The Wolves of K Street: The Secret History of How Big Money Took Over Big Government. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2022.
Nordhaus, William D. “Do Real-Output and Real-Wage Measures Capture Reality? The History of Lighting Suggests Not.” National Bureau of Economic Research, 1996.
Shannon, Claude. “Claude Shannon.” Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Schumpeter, Joseph A. The Theory of Economic Development. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1983. Originally published 1911.
Smith, Adam. “The Uniform Quest for Betterment.” Online Library of Liberty.
Weitzman, Martin L. “Hybridizing Growth Theory.” American Economic Review 86, no. 2 (May 1996): 207–212.
Winterroth, Seth. “How Eclipse Ventures Builds Companies That Redefine Physical Industries.” Machine Minds Podcast, Episode 19. February 9, 2024.
About the Speakers
Philip Auerswald is a professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government. His work is about entrepreneurship, technology, and innovation in a global context. He is the author of most recently, A Phone Is a Cow: How Pioneers of the Mobile Revolution Helped Millions Lift Themselves Out of Poverty (2025). He currently serves as the cochair and executive director of the Global Entrepreneurship Research Network, an initiative of the Kauffman Foundation. He is also the cofounder and coeditor of Innovations, a quarterly journal about entrepreneurial solutions to global challenges published by MIT Press. In June 2013, he led the launch of the National Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, an organization dedicated to using the National Mall in Washington, DC, as a platform to celebrate and support entrepreneurship and innovation.
Russ Roberts is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and president of Shalem College in Jerusalem. In 2006, he founded the award-winning weekly podcast EconTalk, which has featured guests including Milton Friedman, Martha Nussbaum, Christopher Hitchens, Agnes Callard, Bill James, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Amor Towles, and Emily Oster. All 875+ episodes remain available free of charge at EconTalk.org and reach an audience of more than 125,000 listeners in 200 countries.