This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, November 29th, 2021. I'm Caleb Brown.

The push for rural broadband hasn't gone very well to the extent that governments promised that the deployment of

high-speed internet will be cost-effective there's really not that much evidence

either way that from Will Reinhart of the Center for Growth and Opportunity

he says the claims about workforce development

are similarly misleading, and the public ought to be more skeptical of claims about the power

of rural broadband.

There is a big push to get broadband into rural areas and I can tell you from the

experience of visiting my father in southwest Missouri that it is frustrating to visit a home that does not have hot and cold running internet.

And so I definitely feel his pain and he's definitely the person I think of when I think of people who are stuck using 3G connections in order to send and receive pictures of grandkids.

Yeah, like my grandmother.

Yeah, and so that stinks and I don't like it, but at the same time I am just highly skeptical of government attempts to sort of goose that

industry or you know the worst case scenario take charge of the entire process.

So what we've seen a lot of states try to have their plans to do this.

Have any of them worked particularly well?

It depends on what you mean because the big concern that most local

policymakers have is that broadband should help local economies and

boost productivity. The unfortunate side of broadband is that those

things don't actually happen. What ends up happening instead is that broadband comes into a region and it shifts the

markets. It'll shift the labor market, it'll shift the retail market, but it doesn't

seem to do all that much in helping the actual local productivity or the local educational opportunities.

Those things come with computers, with cell phones, with all the other ancillary connected technologies, not just broadband itself.

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