This paper offers an alternative to the view that high technology promotes development and low technology inhibits development. We differentiate between monopoly technology and accessible technology. Monopoly technology produces growth by producing monopoly rents. As a byproduct, it also produces substantial inequality, both within nations and globally. Accessible technology produces growth without monopoly simply by increasing the volume of production in a lucrative business. We illustrate this first with a consideration of successful agrarian-based development in the global North that was based on agricultural products that were not particularly monopolized. We then move to a detailed consideration of fishing in nineteenth-century Norway. Norway’s economic development depended on proceeds from fishing exports. Norwegian fishing had a distinctive technology that made it particularly low-tech and egalitarian. It produced substantial wealth for the nation while producing very little social inequality.

This essay attempts to contribute to the study of gender and development by developing a systematic theory of the division of work between men and women in the global North and the global South. There is an extensive literature on women's work and development; this literature consists of rich case studies that do not attempt to identify general principles that apply to women's work as a whole. In formal employment settings, women are most likely to be excluded from settings where employers are buffered from labor costs and do not have to utilize cheap labor. In the global North, this means settings that are capital-intensive, where raw material and machinery costs reduce the importance of wage costs in total budgets. In the global South, petroleum lowers the importance of wage costs, promoting male employment, while export orientation increases the importance of cheap labor, promoting female employment. Family firms and female self-employment have their own dynamics, which are discussed.