the ability to extract metal from rock Although that initially went unused, it later had profound implications for the developmental course of societies. Technology makes it possible for a more innovative society and broad social change. That dramatic change through the centuries that has evolved socially, industrially, and economically, can be summed up by the term modernization. Cell phones, for example, have changed the lives of millions throughout the world. That is especially true in Africa and other parts of the Middle East, where there is a low-cost communication infrastructure. With cell phone technology, widely dispersed populations are connected, which facilitates business-to-business communication and provides internet access to remoter areas, with a consequential rise in literacy. Applications United States foreign aid in the 1960s President John F. Kennedy (1961–63) relied on economists W.W. Rostow on his staff and outsider John Kenneth Galbraith for ideas on how to promote rapid economic development in the "Third World", as it was called at the time. They promoted modernization models in order to reorient American aid to Asia, Africa and Latin America. In the Rostow version in his The Stages of Economic Growth (1960) progress must pass through five stages, and for underdeveloped world the critical stages were the second one, the transition, the third stage, the takeoff into self-sustaining growth. Rostow argued that American intervention could propel a country from the second to the third stage he expected that once it reached maturity, it would have a large energized middle class that would establish democracy and civil liberties and institutionalize human rights. The result was a comprehensive theory that could be used to challenge Marxist ideologies, and thereby repel communist advances. The model provided the foundation for the Alliance for Progress in Latin America, the Peace Corps, Food for Peace, and the Agency for International Development (AID). Kennedy proclaimed the 1960s the "Development Decade" and substantially increased the budget for foreign assistance. Modernization theory supplied the design, rationale, and justification for these programs. The goals proved much too ambitious, and the economists in a few years abandoned the European-based modernization model as inappropriate to the cultures they were trying to impact. Kennedy and his top advisers were working from implicit ideological assumptions regarding modernization. They firmly believed modernity was not only good for the target populations, but was essential to avoid communism on the one hand or extreme control of traditional rural society