Humanity worldwide is continually developing new technology. Innovations such
as the telephone, TV, and internet permanently change global communication, and
adoption of novel technology is very disproportionate between countries.
Throughout the history of technology adoption documented in our dataset, a
country's GDP is strongly correlated with how quickly it is able to adopt
its use of a technology per capita. However, particular smaller countries like Japan and Germany
often acquire technology disproportionately quickly.
Scroll on to see how these trends manifest throughout communications technology in the 20th century.
All y-axes are log scale and describe the total number of devices in a given country in a particular year.
We chose not to do technology per capita, because the rate of technology acquisition is not related to
a country’s population.
The issue with relating the two is particularly noticeable with the extremely
populous China and India, where a large segment of the population is less privileged with access to new
technology. Measuring technology per capita causes those countries to score very low compared to the rest
of the world. On the other hand, technology acquisition showed a strong correlation with country GDP.
Trends to be aware of: countries with higher GDP have a strong tendency to acquire new technology more rapidly, but particular smaller countries like Japan and Germany often acquire technology disproportionately quickly.
Dataset:
Cross-country Historical Adoption of Technology (CHAT) dataset with discussion
here.