In a recent conversation with a friend, she lamented the hard time she was having in justifying the deployment of thousands of tablets within a company, especially given their high price. But it’s really the opposite: computers pay for themselves in a very short time, no matter what their format. A fact in direct contrast with the old Solow’s productivity paradox.
Just a little research to proof this: take the welfare gain of computers, measured by their compensating variation, that is, the amount of income a consumer would have to give up in order to attain the level of utility that would have realised if computers had never been invented. Most recent results show that is 3.8–4% of total consumption expenditure: in other words, >$1500 per year in a first world country (you can also play with the Matlab code behind this model!)
A high sum that completely justifies their price, but low if it’s compared with the compensating variation of the Internet (26.8%) or that of electricity (92%), ie. no one would live without electricity. And even though the variation of the Internet is much higher than that of computers, and also its contribution to economic growth, computers are Generally Purpose Technologies absolutely necessary to access the Internet, thus complementary to it and its compensating variation cannot be taken apart from them.