Monday, May 30, 2011

How much is technology worth?

How much would you have to be paid to give up your mobile and your computer? How much is reading these pearls of wisdom, viewing pictures of amusing cats and forum fighting with idiots worth to you?

The brilliant Barking up the Wrong Tree blog it looks like mobiles are worth about 10% of income.
Keeping life satisfaction constant, we subsequently derive substantial GDP per capita estimates equivalent to a 10 percentage point increase in broadband and mobile phone penetration.

Median wage wage in US is about $32,000. So mobiles probably worth about 3 thousand dollars a year to the average American.

The value of the internet seems to vary from $1700 to $3800 according to this slate article
a model based on the value of people's time, ultimately estimating that Internet access is worth 2 percent of full income. Thus, they estimated the value of the welfare gain provided by the Internet ranged as high as $3,800 per person.

This means that in the 15 years that the internet and mobiles have become ubiquitous we are something like $5000 richer per year because of them.

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