MC433 - week 5

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These are my notes from October 26 for MC433 at the London School of Economics for the 2017-2018 school year. I took this module as part of the one-year Inequalities and Social Science MSc program.

The usual disclaimer: all notes are my personal impressions and do not necessarily reflect the view of the lecturer.


Inclusion and Access

Readings

Development as Freedom by Amartya Sen (chapter 3)

Context: written in 1999, seems like he’s trying to sway a fairly libertarian/right-leaning audience into caring about inequality and justice. He starts from a Rawlsian POV but then modifies/builds on it, saying that if we truly care about equality, we can’t just be satisfied by “income” equality—we have to ask if people have different needs. Basically a long-winded way of saying “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” but in a more libertarian-friendly way. I wasn’t really into this reading though I’m sure it was important at the time, and probably had some impact on his intended audience (i.e., people who aren’t me).

Report from Chilean Presidential Commission, 1999

On best practices for how to move toward an information society. Acknowledging the technological revolution (the rising importance of the Internet, non-material assets, and computerisation). The state will have to play a role in modernising—there has already been some push toward greater access to digital resources, but it’s been uneven. Summary of suggested landscape: public-private partnerships, transparent/competitive markets, new legal frameworks for fostering spread of e-commerce, flexible regulations to encourage investment by private corporations. A fairly neoliberal agenda overall.

Technologies of Choice? by Dorothea Kleine (chapter 6)

On digital procurement services in Chile and the problem with them (not really designed for citizens and thus allowed corporate interests to proliferate at the expense of local microentrepreneurs).

Lecture

(First week of our look at the networked era of communication technologies.)

Seminar