The latest development of humanity's communications resources is of course, the computer. The creation of a mechanism to exchange information of all types nearly instantaneously has introduced unprecedented freedoms and brought consequences and implications we are still dealing with today.

It may seem a bit redundant, but to become a powerful industrial nation a nation has to first build a powerful industry. Not just factories, but transportation networks to move stuff in and out, giant power stations and wire grids to feed the monster machines, and the logistical sophistication required to pull it all together to provide a product people want at a price they're willing to pay.

As if this weren't hard enough, you have to do it in the shadow of countries that have already set up their own huge, expensive industries and are doing their level best to get you to buy their stuff instead of your own. An ugly truth about free trade is that it's much more about opening developing markets to established industries than it is about allowing developing industries access to established markets. You have to be extremely clever to survive in an unregulated, pre-established business market, and nobody gives out those kinds of lessons for free.

The rise of information technology as the driving force behind industrial might short-circuited this entire process. For the first time in history software, sequences of ones and zeros that can't really be said to exist in any one place at any one time, is what actually drives a first-world economy. And you don't need a steel mill to make software.

Instead of building huge factories and the amazingly complex infrastructures required to support them, all a country really needs to do to join the software game is build a reasonably reliable residential-level power grid and some big air-conditioned rooms to house people and computers. Education suddenly becomes the true key to success, and it's far easier to build a good mind than it is to build a good factory.

It's precisely because writing software requires education, and lots of it, that computers can be seen as utterly liberating to the peoples of developing nations. Because it's not just any sort of education that works. You only learn to create software by thinking critically, by questioning assumptions, by synthesizing ideas in new and novel ways.

A country building a software-based industry cannot oppress its people in the same way a developing industrial power can. Well-educated people practiced in the art of critical thinking are merely future gulag residents to a "traditional" developing nation, because anyone can work in a factory. But when education is the engine that drives your country's economy these people cannot, will not, be ignored.

The benefits are enormous. Unlike most other products, software is not a low-margin industry. The margins are almost obscene; especially once the development costs have been "paid off". Since the "machine" that ultimately created these products has legs and a mind of its own, profits are quickly distributed to employees to keep them with the company. And even if a company implodes completely and throws hundreds, or even thousands of these people out of work, smart people don't stay unemployed for very long.

This isn’t some theoretical construct. It works. Ireland was once a completely hopeless backwater of a country, with unemployment levels routinely exceeding 20% each year. Today it's considered the "silicon valley" of Europe, with employment levels so high cities are completely gridlocked with people just trying to get to work. India may yet surpass the United States as the home of the most innovative software developers in the world. Already most software companies have huge, and hugely important, divisions there, oftentimes the only profitable part of some of them.

And these are just two examples. All anyone really needs to start a profitable software business is education, skill, and an idea. You don’t even need to own a computer… any will do.

Now there are some who will say this is a gross oversimplification. You also have to contend with business plans, marketing, copyrights, patents, and no end of other complications. But these are rich peoples’ problems. There are millions of people, millions of educated people, who would love to help deal with these kinds of problems.

And that’s how economies get started.