Why technology alone can't lift people out of poverty

Just a few years ago, life was dramatically different for 38-year-old Washington (DC) resident Behrooz Bakhtiary. Bakhtiary was a single father working odd jobs as a security guard, a club bouncer and a hotel concierge to pay child support when his 5-year-old daughter, Therela, was diagnosed with leukemia. Looking for a job online meant time spent walking to a public library to get access to a computer and the Internet to search for jobs — time that was hard to come by while already working full-time and trying to raise a 5-year-old. For millions of Americans, this Catch-22 is known as the digital divide — a term that once applied to people without Internet access but now refers to a spectrum of people whose lives are impacted by the limitations of Internet access.

Ironically, many experts argue that those trapped in the digital divide struggle to get out because of technology’s impact on the job market. “There are fewer and fewer jobs where you don’t have to interact with any type of technology,” Brookings Institute senior fellow Martha Ross said. Educational opportunities around technology are important because as the number of jobs that don’t require much formal education has ebbed, education has struggled to give students the skills they need to keep up with the pace of technology changes. While public schools and colleges argue over how soon some technology skills, such as coding, should be implemented into curriculum (some say children should start before they enter school), people who are not digital natives need stop-gap education in the meantime.