It was a nice story, but the evidence was mostly anecdotal," Comin says. "I thought it would be very natural to test that story with my data. I wanted to look at how technology interacts with geographical diffusion."
In a series of research papers, Comin and colleagues investigated the relationship between a country's historical rate of technology adoption and its per capita income. It stands to reason that adopting a new technology would increase a nation's wealth. After all, new tools—from the telegraph to the PC—enable expedited production of goods and services, eventually facilitating economic growth. Technological tools also improve a country's perceived standard of living, as in the case of the light bulb or the cell phone.
But Comin's research is striking in what it shows about the historical reach of technology adoption. According to his findings, the rate at which countries adopted new tools hundreds of years ago strongly affects whether they are rich or poor today. Comin also has begun to uncover why there's still such a disparity in the wealth of nations, in spite of the fact that technology adoption lags have shortened dramatically in the past few decades.
In their paper An Exploration of Technology Diffusion, Comin and fellow researcher Bart Hobijn described a scientific model to track the effects of technology adoption, testing the model on 15 technologies in 166 countries from 1820 to 2003. They covered major technologies related to transportation (from steamships to airplanes), telecommunication (from the telegraph to the cell phone), IT (the PC and the Internet), health care (MRI scanners), steel (namely tonnage produced using blast oxygen furnaces), and electricity. For each technology, they compared when it was invented with when it was adopted by each country: for instance, the automobile was invented in 1885, but didn't reach many nations until the latter half of the twentieth century.