The information gap between rich and poor in the world is difficult to assess. For example, it took me three months to find out from a perplexed Bangladeshi embassy official in Washington, D.C., what fraction of their economy is devoted to hardware and software products and related services. He finally calculated the fraction at one-tenth of 1 percent. In the United States, the corresponding figure is 100 times larger-fully 10 percent of our economy goes to information technology. Since the average Bangladeshi is 30 times poorer than the average American, the disparity, per person, between our annual expenditure on information technology and theirs is even more staggering-on average, $3,000 for each American, versus $1 for each Bangladeshi!

I suspect that if I could locate an "embassy" representing poor Americans, I would find an equally screeching dissonance between information technology expenditures in the inner city and the suburbs. It stands to reason that people struggling to get their daily bites of food have nothing left for the more ethereal bytes of information. Take this disparity to its logical next step: The rich, who can afford to buy the new technologies, use them to become increasingly productive and therefore even richer while the poor stand still. The conclusion is as logical as it is inescapable: Left to its own devices the information revolution will increase the gap between rich and poor nations and between rich and poor people within nations.