The untold stories of a generation of pioneers who brought the mobile revolution to global majorities worldwide
Far more than a phone, today's mobile is a handheld digital device embedded within a global network—and accessible to nearly everyone, everywhere. Creating the potential for technological inclusion at this unprecedented scale took both science-based inventions and necessity-driven innovations; both the scale of the largest corporations and the adaptability of entrepreneurs; and both regulation by government and the responsiveness of markets.
A Phone Is a Cow explores the revolutionary transition of the mobile phone from an urban convenience in wealthy countries to a global necessity. The book is built upon the untold stories of a generation of pioneers who brought the mobile revolution to global majorities worldwide. Collectively, their work has had a decisively greater impact on the lives of most people on the planet than the activities of Silicon Valley titans usually featured in the books that line airport bookshelves. In the stories of these market pioneers, we see replicable processes for bringing frontier technologies to excluded populations by combining determination with empathy and creative foresight.
A Phone Is a Cow will draw readers in with the patterns that connect history, economics, technology, sociology, ethics, and daily lived experience—and provide a richer understanding of the long-term trends that matter most.
Reviews
"A Phone Is a Cow is a refreshingly upbeat story with an important moral about the indispensable role that connection, information, and imagination play in human development. At a moment when technology threatens to transform every aspect of our lives, often for the worse, Auerswald shows us how humans can still control our tools, rather than allowing our tools to control us."—Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO, New America, and Bert G. Kerstetter '66 University Professor Emerita of Politics and International Affairs, Princeton University
"Philip E. Auerswald's A Phone Is a Cow is the best and most current treatment of the mobile phone revolution and how it has benefitted people around the entire world."—Tyler Cowen, professor of economics, George Mason University, and author of The Complacent Class
About the Author
Philip E. Auerswald is a professor at George Mason University's Schar School of Policy and Government; cofounder and coeditor of the journal Innovations; and the founding board chair and president of the National Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. He has written many books, including The Coming Prosperity: How Entrepreneurs Are Transforming the Global Economy (2012).
Bengt Holmström, a Finnish economist and Nobel Laureate, is the Paul A. Samuelson Professor of Economics, Emeritus, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
