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Mix-Ansicht- Wie lange braucht ein Dritte-Welt Land, um seine technologische Infrastruktur - kingsolomon, 17.06.2003, 20:41
Wie lange braucht ein Dritte-Welt Land, um seine technologische Infrastruktur
-->auf höchstes Niveau zu bringen? Am Beispiel Mongolei.
wieso fällt mir jetzt dazu Norbert Blüm's"Die Rentä is sischä" ein??
Jim Rogers im heutigen Daily Reckoning.
DIGITAL MONGOLIA
By Jim Rogers
Mongolia is about the size of Iran or Alaska, which makes
it about a fifth the size of the lower forty-eight states,
and its total population of 2.6 million is about the same
as Kansas City's. More than a quarter of its citizens live
in the capital city, Ulan Bator, leaving a very small
number of people spread over a very large geographic area.
It is hard to believe that as recently as the mid-
fourteenth century the Mongols controlled most of Eurasia
from Korea to Hungary, having conquered it more than a
hundred years earlier.
It was against invasion by the Mongol hordes that the Great
Wall of China was begun. They were invading Japan when a
sudden typhoon sank their ships and drove them away. The
Japanese have used the word kamikaze,"divine wind," ever
since. Marco Polo claimed to have traveled from Venice to
visit the Mongol Empire. The Mongols swept the world as the
great horsemen of their day, and a simple invention gave
them much of their power.
Their use of the stirrup gave them control of their fast
ponies at a time when others were using horses mainly as
beasts of burden. Eventually everyone had the new
technology and the Mongols faded into history, outpaced by
even newer technologies.
Outer Mongolia is now a name almost synonymous with the
word"backwater," evocative of the remote, the retrograde,
the unimproved.
Yet Ulan Bator, the capital of Mongolia, is perhaps the
most technologically up-to-date city in the world, totally
digital. With the fall of the Soviet Union, a free and
independent Mongolia benefited from numerous sources of
foreign aid, and with no infrastructure to upgrade, it
leapfrogged about three generations of technology. The
whole city is wired with fiber-optic cable, enabling you to
jack into the Web from almost any phone in town.
You can't do that in Russia. There, it is hard enough to
make a phone call out. To send e-mail in Russia, you have
to pay a physical, not a virtual, visit to an Internet
service provider - which we did all along our route. As it
happens, every decent-sized town in Russia has an ISP,
often a battered office jammed with half a dozen aging
computers and half a dozen roughly dressed youths staring
at their screens. Descending on them, we would find them
shocked and delighted to greet visitors from the exotic
West.
"How much to plug into your lines?" we would ask,
brandishing our laptops. At a dollar an hour, they were
wildly overcharging us, but we were overjoyed to be able to
update our Web site. In the absence of these
entrepreneurial outposts, we would have been out of touch
with friends and family for weeks at a time. It was just
one more example of how dramatically the world had changed
in the space of a decade.
Another change spawned by the digital age, and one of the
more significant changes for the world traveler, was access
to money. Paige and I had been through twenty-two
countries, and to my surprise I had suffered very few of
the problems I had experienced on my last trip regarding
currency. Last time, crossing borders, both entering and
exiting countries, I had had to hide my cash, confronting
border guards who wanted me to declare it on special forms.
(Of course, many border guards had simply been looking for
a bribe.) Back then I would hide currency in the frame of
my bike, my shoes, my helmet, anywhere I figured border
guards would not look.
To avoid carrying large amounts of cash, I would have funds
wired to me at banks in capital cities, so I would have
money for food, hotels, and gas. On this trip none of that
had been necessary. I did not need to carry a lot of money.
Now, on the verge of the new millennium, Visa, Master-Card,
Diners Club, and American Express were accepted everywhere.
And even in Russia, not to mention up-to-the-minute Ulan
Bator, we could just march off to the nearest ATM and take
out whatever cash we needed, when we needed it, sometimes
even in dollars. One had to be attentive, however. In
Siberia I once obtained some cash, but while I was putting
my credit card away, the machine took back the money! It
took two days to get the cash back.
Running phone lines across Mongolia, a country so large
with a population so small, would be both a technological
nightmare and economic insanity. So the country, in another
instance of leapfrogging technology, went straight to
digital communication. Everybody in Mongolia has a digital
cell phone. The nation's nomads, crossing the country on
horseback, carry them. There is a cell phone in most yurts.
This leapfrogging of technology has impacted history for
centuries.
In early-nineteenth-century America towns were desperate
for canals to put them on the trade routes. Those
unfortunate cities without canals went straight to the
newfangled railroad. Soon the old canal routes disappeared.
(Remember the Erie Canal?) Then along came the Interstate
Highway System, and the old railroad towns that ignored the
impact of the highway disappeared. San Diego is a major
U.S. city now, but not Tucumcari, New Mexico, a major
railroad interchange.
So, figure out what will replace the highway system and
jump on board while everyone else is angling for the new
interstate.
On the road to Ulan Bator we saw nomads moving their camps,
uprooting themselves and all their horses, camels, and
goats, and traveling to new grazing grounds. These were the
descendants of Genghis Khan, who had swept across the
steppes on horseback. The women, we noticed, were expert
riders just like the men.
We started snapping pictures. Photographing a yurt, we were
invited inside by the woman who owned it. She showed us
around the humble dwelling and served us salted tea. In
this part of the world, I was surprised to discover, they
do not put sugar, honey, or milk in their tea; they drink
it with salt. (Of course, there has never been much sugar
grown in Mongolia.) Just one more culinary adventure.
Regards,
Jim Rogers
- excerpt from Adventure Capitalist
P.S. We wanted to take Polaroids of her and all the kids,
about eight of them, of all ages, several photos, so we
could give some to the family.
She grabbed her youngest and asked us to wait. And then,
like any mother, anywhere in the world - do not let anyone
tell you that people are fundamentally different - she
combed the child's hair and changed his shirt before
letting him pose for the pictures. The second shirt was
slightly less dirty than the first. She wanted him to look
his best. That mother could have been in Greenwich,
Connecticut, as easily as on the steppes of Mongolia.
Ed note: In a record-breaking 3-year, 152,000 mile journey,
Jim Rogers and his wife Paige Parker took the"ultimate"
road trip - in a bright yellow Mercedes. The consummate
investor, Rogers gathered precise details on the investment
climate across the Mideast, Southeast Asia, China, Siberia,
Europe, Africa and South America. He's now condensed his
insights into a great new book: Adventure Capitalist, The
Ultimate Investor's Road Trip.
This book is excellent. It's not only highly entertaining,
but it's a must read if you hope to understand and prosper
in the rapidly changing post-Cold War world.
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