The KLM Lounge in Schiphol is a great place. There’s decent coffee, free papers that I might read, food and you can take a shower. Then there’s the odd 60’s futurist decor that makes you think you’ve stepped onto the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

In trying to suppress my ambivalence about going to Kenya, boarding a domestic flight the next day and then flying to Japan four days later, I’m reading Joe Stiglitz’s new book, “Creating a Learning Society: A New Approach to Growth, Development, and Social Progress (Kenneth J. Arrow Lecture Series).”

Though I’ve just started the book, I’m finding it quite interesting. Stiglitz and others attribute development to the sharing of innovations rather than the mere accumulation of capital. Societies grow because their people learn new things, and some countries do better because they are better at learning how to learn.

Noting that private firms often entrench themselves in particular modes of operation which discourages innovation, Stiglitz argues that government investments in education and R&D and the guarantee of a legal framework which protects property can allow innovations to flourish.

In reading the book, I kept thinking about this 2km stretch of road in Nairobi which has been under construction for the past five years. It’s absolutely pathetic. Buses have to pass through a one lane mud road next to the construction site, while workers move at a snails pace, slowly pouring concrete by hand. Though the reasons for the slow tempo of road construction most certainly include corruption and mismanagement (the contractor is Kenyan), one also has to notice that nearly all roads in Kenya are built by foreign companies.

The Japanese built a masterpiece of a road, complete with cross walks, bike lanes and dedicated pedestrian ways in a tenth of the time. To Japan’s credit, they use local workers, unlike the Chinese.

Building roads isn’t complicated, or, at least, the complications have been worked with over and over and road building is now an established discipline, with text books and training programs available all over the world.

So why hasn’t the knowledge of road building been successfully transferred to Kenya? What the hell is wrong?

Perhaps this is what Stiglitz is talking about. Without beating up on Kenya too hard (but why not?), Kenyan schools are a shambles and the government is only marginally interested in improving the educational fortunes of the country. Schools are designed to train low level clerks for the civil service, and don’t aspire to train kids for science, math or engineering. Though many, many technologies are already established the world over, perhaps the poor state of education hampers technology diffusion.

Back to my coffee.