> because the OLPC program had other benefits (increasing uptake of lower cost laptops worldwide, giving children computer skills, etc.)...

What does that matter if food insecurity, stunted growth, low quality K-6 schools, and other critical issues remain?

From a human capital development perspective, the amount of money spent per year on OLPC could have subsidized a number of similar programs that are both cheaper and have been documented to lead to better developmental indicators.

And it wasn't like OLPC actually placed educators to teach programming at the K-10 level in most of the target regions.

On top of that, broadband and internet penetration didn't expand until the 2010s with Asian commodity telecom equipment being mass produced and exported to developing markets - so what use was a computer which had no internet to a household that was almost always in the lowest income bracket in a developing country?!?

This is why evidence-based policymaking has become the norm and why Banerjee and Duflo won a Nobel Prize.

Edit: can't reply

You (most likely) grew up in a first world country and in the top 5% of households globally.

For the target communities for OLPC, much more basic needs like clean water, school access, nutrition access, and other services were either limited or functionally non-existent.

Much of rural Peru during OLPC (the 2000s) [0] had HDIs comparable to what Laos, Cambodia, and Bangladesh today.

More critically, Peru back then used to be more developed than China [0], yet China's HDI has now outpaced Peru developmentally because local government took an evidence-based approach to developmental policymaking thanks to guidance from Stanford's REAP group [1]

I'm sure you can recognize that the policies needed in a developing country are entirely different from those in a developed country.

[0] - https://globaldatalab.org/shdi/table/shdi/PER+CHN/?levels=1+...

[1] - https://sccei.fsi.stanford.edu/reap

▲

Spooky23 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Why should I have gone to college?

My outcomes would be better if I were just richer, smarter and better looking.

▲

readthenotes1 3 days ago | parent [-]

There's a real doubt whether college is a reasonable investment these days. The costs are outrageous and the improvement, for society, seems lacking.

If you want to be richer, smarter, and be better looking, food and shelter security might go a long ways

	▲	alephnerd 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		The math of college still holds true in the US depending on what you major in [0][1]. Most non-college goers are not attending apprenticeship programs or joining union jobs - which nowadays increasingly require a college education [2]. This isn't the 1970s anymore where you can go to the local factory and screw parts by hand - manufacturing, carpentry, metalworking, and other industrial arts increasingly require STEM fundamentals which for most students they can only acquire in some form of college (be it 2-year or 4-year). I've seen this first hand now that I've been taking carpentry courses at my local CC as a side hobby - the union track apprenticeship program that's part of the CC expects an associates degree at a minimum. [0] - https://www.ppic.org/publication/is-college-worth-it/ [1] - https://static1.squarespace.com/static/60832ecef615231cedd30... [2] - https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/union2.pdf

▲

cameronh90 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The OLPC project clearly didn’t achieve its aims, but how would they have known that without trying?

More recently, the impact of smart phones on the developing world has been transformational, suggesting some of the ideas behind OLPC may have been good, but the specific implementation lacking. Thanks to smart phones, developing communities now have access to media in global languages, online education, finance, communication, markets (without having to travel for miles), disaster recovery, health resources and much more.

You can even now see rural villages themselves prioritise phone infrastructure over many things that on the surface seem more important - such as by fixing the phone charger before they fix the plumbing!