The Pervasive Biases of Modern Do-Gooding
In 1987 I moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to enroll as a freshman at Harvard. Bacchanalian parties weren’t really my thing, so I had a lot of time on weekend evenings. It felt a little lonely in my dorm room while loud music thumped its ways through the walls, so I took walks around the city and found that it catered to a vice of my own: books.
At the time there were as many as thirty booksellers in the few blocks that made up Harvard Square. Local tour guides boasted that there were more bookstores per square mile than anywhere else on earth. I remember marinating in the musty smell of McIntyre & Moore, seeking enlightenment at the Thomas More Bookshop, skimming leatherbound copies of Plato at Mandrake, indulging guilty pleasures at Science Fantasy Books, and bottom-feeding at Buck-a-Book. My favorite was WordsWorth on Brattle Street. I spent hours upon hours in its two floor-to-ceiling stories of glorious inventory, all sold at discount.
Today those shops are gone. With no more than seven or eight bookstores left, Harvard Square has lost its bibliophilic bragging rights. Or, possibly worse, with those seven or eight shops, it might still be the Bookstore Capital of the World. Everywhere you look, brick-and-mortar bookstores are being steamrolled under an online juggernaut.
Amazon sold its first book online in July 1995. By 2013 the company captured as much as a third of all US book sales and 60 percent of all e-books.1 Publishers Weekly, “the bible of the book business,” might as well be called Amazon Watch. Between the best seller lists and the book reviews, the articles seem to fall into two categories: shock and breast-beating about Amazon’s latest ploys, and the forced cheer of publishers, librarians, and retailers frantically seeking the bright side of a cataclysm. The collective fear is that the industry will only have room for Amazon, its customers, and a few best-selling authors. Midlist writers and discerning publishers will cease to exist. The infinite variety of genuine literature will be reduced to Fifty Shades of Grey. Main Street will never again be a site for serendipitous browsing among stacks of lovingly selected books.
Meanwhile, this angst goes largely unnoticed by consumers. They might remember the neighborhood bookstore with nostalgia, but they’re happy that they can buy new e-books for $9.99 and have access to just about any text at their fingertips. Is there really a crisis in publishing? Maybe old-school publishers just can’t learn new tricks.
Whatever you think of Amazon, you’re likely to assume that digital caused these changes. Here’s a twenty-years-young Internet-only bookseller that almost singlehandedly built the e-book market – what other explanation could there be?
History points the finger elsewhere. The book business has been cutting costs and courting best sellers for decades, leading to plenty of anxiety along the way. After Penguin began mass-marketing the paperback in 1935, George Orwell wrote, “In my capacity as reader I applaud the Penguin Books; in my capacity as writer I pronounce them anathema.”2 Starting in the 1970s, it was Barnes & Noble’s turn to lay waste to the bookselling establishment. With its block-spanning superstores, aggressive discounts, and mail-order sales, the brand grew mighty, eventually acquiring and killing mall mainstays B. Dalton and Waldenbooks, which themselves had stolen business from independents.3 And publishers have been chasing the blockbuster since long before the Internet. In Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century, sociologist John B. Thompson highlights an industry turn toward fewer titles, with each expected to have bigger sales.4 He traces this trend back to the 1960s, when rapid consolidation of publishing houses began. The mega-merger of Random House and Penguin took place in 2013, but Random House itself is an amalgamation. It swallowed up Ballantine, Bantam, Crown, Dell, Doubleday, Fawcett, Fodor’s, Knopf, and so on down the alphabet.
In short, Amazon and its digital ways are an extrapolation – an amplification – of pre-digital patterns. On the one hand, more books of greater variety are being published. There is a growing population of writers, and publishing is being commoditized.5 On the other hand, the books that receive widespread attention and land on best seller lists are a dwindling proportion of the total. The first trend is sometimes called “the long tail”; the second represents a “winner-take-all” economy.6 Commentators tend to highlight one or the other of these phenomena, but both are happening at once. Together they cause the shrinking middle that is the hallmark of any industry – music, movies, manufacturing – whose product can be replicated and distributed cheaply. Indeed, in the book business it is widely acknowledged that fewer and fewer authors are able to make a living through writing. The squeeze, however, long predates digital tools.
Amazon’s case reinforces a consequence of the Law of Amplification: Technology trends aren’t always technology trends. They often have a pre-digital history. Amazon is an extension of a larger book industry driving toward cold efficiency at the expense of less tangible merits. Mix in digital technology, and something like Amazon is sure to come along. (And it would come again, if Amazon were to perish.)
To understand Amazon properly, it’s not enough to know its technology tactics. You also have to know the history of paperbacks, the expansive aggression of Barnes & Noble, and the inclinations of print publishers, which, even as Amazon threatens them, are cut from the same cloth. You have to look at the non-digital context.
Similarly, to better understand our technology fixation, it’s important to recognize its larger social and historical context. As I began to doubt the hype around packaged interventions, I wanted to see if I could bypass their problems. Maybe there were other approaches to social change. So I engaged with three ideas that have growing support – randomized controlled trials, social enterprises, and happiness as a goal. These are largely unrelated efforts, but they all have great merit and are well-regarded within their specializations. Promisingly, each had a potential claim to exorcising the curse of packaged interventions.
The Randomista Revolution
In July 2011 I visited a school in Kotra, a little village in southern Rajasthan. The small hut had white plaster walls and a thatched roof. About twenty children wearing bright blue uniforms sat on the floor in two circles, one led by a male teacher while the other quietly worked arithmetic problems. I kneeled next to a couple of the students and watched as they marked small slates of blackboard with chalk. They were practicing subtraction with three-digit numbers. A couple of students stumbled over borrowing a one from the next digit, but most of them worked the arithmetic correctly. They were focused, and the teacher was attentive.
The school was operated by a nonprofit called Seva Mandir that has nurtured rural communities in two districts of Rajasthan for over forty years. I was there to visit a project I had read about in a research paper.7 The paper’s first author had an innovative idea to combat teacher absenteeism, and it was tested in Seva Mandir’s schools: Teachers would take digital photographs of themselves and their classes at the beginning and end of each day they were at school. Then, the teachers’ pay would be linked to the number of days each month for which they supplied photos. To prevent teachers from cheating, the researchers devised special tamper-proof digital cameras.
It was an interesting idea, but what brought me to Rajasthan that day was not the use of digital technology per se. I had already seen hundreds of technology projects by then. What made this project unique was that world-renowned researchers had used a rigorous methodology to establish something that seemed to contradict the Law of Amplification. The research team was led by Esther Duflo, a brilliant MIT economist who counts among her honors a MacArthur “genius grant” as well as the John Bates Clark Medal, a good predictor of future Nobel laureates. As a pioneering member of the Abdul Lateef Jameel Poverty Action Lab (JPAL), Duflo has been a tireless advocate for the use of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to verify the value of antipoverty programs. This is the methodology used in clinical medicine, whereby a control group establishes a baseline against which the effectiveness of a treatment can be compared. In applying the rigor of hard science to social questions, Duflo and her colleagues are revolutionaries. Rivals and supporters have nicknamed them “randomistas.”
In a paper describing the effort, Duflo and her colleagues reported dramatic results. As expected, attendance was captured by the cameras, and teachers showed up more often to class. And the teachers’ consistent presence encouraged students to show up, too. Two photos a day kept absenteeism at bay.
But reducing absences isn’t the end goal – better education is. And here the experiment had an even more impressive outcome. Compared with students in a control group, the students in the camera-monitored classrooms performed better on tests of math, reading, and writing. The teachers who bothered to show up for the photos must have stayed to teach, and, apparently, their teaching was effective. This finding is striking, because other studies of developing-world schools – including one by Duflo herself – show that time sitting in classrooms doesn’t always translate to significant learning.8
For me, Kotra offered new hope. Maybe in some circumstances, technology could work wonders on its own. In this case, the cameras seemed to cause strong educational outcomes with no special attention paid to teachers. Maybe I was premature in declaring the futility of isolated packaged interventions. I was curious about the tamper-proof cameras and what it was about the project as a whole that made it work. Could its lessons be generalized to other contexts?
Packing Tape, But No Packaged Teaching
After the class in Kotra, I asked the teacher to show me how he took the class photos. He took a camera out of a cabinet and flipped through photos on the display. Each showed a teacher standing at attention next to three rows of uniformed students. As the teacher handed the camera to me, I was a bit disappointed to find that the “tamper-proof camera” turned out to be unexpectedly low-tech. It was an inexpensive Yashica digital camera with cellophane packing tape placed over the controls.9 Still, the pristine condition of the tape suggested that the tamper-proofing achieved its purpose.
Something else I learned on that visit, though, caused far greater disappointment. The authors wrote, “Our results suggest that providing incentives for attendance in nonformal schools can increase learning levels.”10 The paper was sure to please anyone who believes in meritocratic rewards for individual effort. It was titled “Incentives Work,” and it attributed all the educational gains to the differential pay provided to teachers for photo-proven attendance. If you had only the paper to go by, you’d believe that wherever there is high teacher absenteeism, incentive pay for photo-validated attendance would be sufficient to improve learning. As JPAL’s website puts it, “If teacher attendance can be improved this should flow through into improved test scores.”11
But this finding may not stand up in even in Kotra, much less in low-income villages elsewhere. The researchers neglected the full context of the project. After visiting the school, I spent a few hours with Seva Mandir staff at their offices in Udaipur. By then, I had seen many of their other initiatives, and it was clear that Seva Mandir was a devoted, well-run organization that worked small miracles in almost all of its programs. I wondered if what I saw with the camera-monitoring program wasn’t so much a counterexample to the Law of Amplification as yet another instance of it. Maybe the results weren’t caused by the camera program alone, but by the camera program as implemented by a strong organization committed to quality education.12
Conversations with the staff confirmed my hunch. When Seva Mandir began working with schools in Kotra several years before the study, the teachers were inexperienced and their lessons poor. In keeping with the pace of rural life, parents didn’t care much about either teacher or student absenteeism. For years, Seva Mandir worked extensively with the schools, teachers, and parents to improve pedagogy and to persuade everyone involved of the value of daily attendance.
By the time camera monitoring was put in place, the teachers were more motivated and effective than when they had started. They were operating with a level of commitment and ability rare in rural India. The teacher I met in Kotra, for instance, was far more skilled than others I had seen in government schools. His lesson was pitched well, and he encouraged the right kind of interaction.13 So, while camera-monitored, attendance-based pay surely had its impact, the educational benefits came on top of years of effort by Seva Mandir and the Kotra community.
None of this is mentioned in the paper. There is only one paragraph about the groundwork that Seva Mandir had laid prior to the trial, and it focused narrowly on the efforts surrounding teacher attendance, not on the other painstaking labors to improve teacher capacity or community expectations. As a result, the paper leaves the impression that camera monitoring is the only thing you need to implement in order to improve learning in schools. In effect the study attributes the nutritional value of a whole meal to dessert alone.14
Originally, I saw in RCTs the hope of transcending the limitations of packaged interventions. Duflo and other randomistas discourage broad theories to guide social change. Instead they encourage lots of experiments to see what works.15 It’s a sensible, data-driven approach, and, as a result, RCTs are seeing a surge of popularity. Not only economists but political scientists and sociologists are now running more RCTs.
Critics have noted, however, that not everything can be tested with an RCT.16 Some questions are inherently harder to explore with the technique. In practice, certain kinds of questions are systematically neglected, and some programs never receive the imprimatur of an RCT. The methodology excels at comparing packaged interventions against one another. If you want to know whether camera-based monitoring or a midday meal is more likely to help students do better on tests, an RCT is great. But comparing packaged interventions against non-packageable alternatives is much more difficult.
Here’s why. In order to run an effective RCT, researchers must carefully ensure a number of conditions. The experimental group must be selected so as to be without bias (hence, randomization). The control group must remain unaffected by the experiment. The intervention must be implemented exactly as defined. Data must be collected. And all of this must be done to exacting standards. To guarantee these requirements, researchers prefer to run RCTs in partnership with capable organizations such as Seva Mandir – that is, organizations capable of following onerous instructions. But by working with competent implementers, the experiments necessarily occur in special conditions that aren’t common elsewhere.
When the results of an experiment can’t be generalized beyond their immediate context, scientists call it a problem of “external validity.” Duflo and other randomistas say external validity can come by repeating studies in different contexts. Technically, that’s true, but it’s not easy to do for testing the value of capable implementation. The very thing you need for a good controlled trial would have to be suspended for a part of the experiment.17 This is the RCT’s Achilles’ heel.
You can hear reverberations of Rossi’s Iron Law of Evaluation. There is, he wrote, a world of difference “between running a program on a small scale with highly skilled and very devoted personnel and running a program with the lesser skilled and less devoted personnel.”18 The Law of Amplification is also in effect: Packaged interventions work in proportion to the capacity brought to bear. If you conduct experiments entirely in air where institutional capacity can be taken for granted, then you don’t know how the intervention would run under water, where capacity might not be present.
To be clear, I’m not against RCTs in and of themselves. I have applied RCT methodology in my own research. I believe that packaged interventions should be verified by RCTs more often. I’m on the board of JPAL’s sister organization, Innovations for Poverty Action, a nonprofit that also runs RCTs and whose work I deeply respect and support.
But if RCTs are an essential tool of decision-making for social policy, they still need to be placed within a larger conceptual framework. If a world-renowned economist and careful experimentalist such as Duflo can’t avoid the pathologies of packaged interventions, it’s not clear that other researchers running RCTs can either. A single methodology cannot be the sole paradigm for determining what’s right for social change. The problem is not RCTs themselves as much as careless interpretation of their results.19 An RCT is just one good tool in the toolbox of program evaluation. Good tools are important, but it’s even more important that architects and artisans use the right combination of tools in the right way for each decision-making task.
Eradicating Poverty Through Profits?
Another fashionable trend sees practitioners applying for-profit business approaches to social causes. The idea was put forth seductively by C. K. Prahalad, a professor of business at the University of Michigan. In his 2004 book The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, he wrote that the 4 billion people in the world who live on less than $2 a day could be enriched if they were viewed as a business opportunity.20 Prahalad’s motto is captured in the book’s subtitle: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits.
According to Prahalad, governments and nonprofits have been going about things all wrong, especially when it comes to poverty. They commit two sins hateful to any business: First, they don’t cover their own costs; second, they’re unable to reach large numbers of people. “Charity might feel good,” Prahalad observed, “but it rarely solves the problem in a scalable and sustainable fashion.”21
Prahalad’s proposal was to sell low-cost products and services with the goal of fostering poor people’s “capacity to consume.” These people, he said, were “value-conscious consumers,” and affordable consumption opportunities served them by “offering them choices and encouraging self-esteem.”22 Prahalad’s rhetoric rehashed the themes of mainstream economics: individual choice, market freedom, and poverty alleviation without politics. He promised that there were “sustainable win-win scenarios where the poor are actively engaged and, at the same time, the companies providing products and services to them are profitable.”23
If this sounds too good to be true, that’s because, by and large, it is. Although Prahalad’s book is crammed with case studies, none of the examples actually shows a firm increasing its profit margins while improving the lives of poor customers. Aneel Karnani, another University of Michigan professor, took a critical look at Prahalad’s nine case studies and found that four were companies catering primarily to middle-income consumers, two were nonprofits sustained in part by public funding, and two were projects that hadn’t seen any profit. Only one was a for-profit corporation that made money selling to poor consumers.24
That last case is worth examining, because, as much as it seems to fit Prahalad’s thesis, it still comes up short. The company in question was the Unilever subsidiary Hindustan Lever Limited (HLL), and the product was soap, possibly Prahalad’s most widely cited example. Diarrhea is deadly for many children in India, but it can often be prevented by hand washing. So HLL sold Lifebuoy soap in small sachets that were affordably priced for “bottom of the pyramid” consumers.
It’s one thing to sell soap, though, and it’s another to instill hand-washing habits in people who’ve never learned the germ theory of disease. HLL tried two approaches. It ran a marketing campaign designed by the Madison Avenue giant Ogilvy & Mather, and it established a public-private partnership with the Indian government. Together, HLL and the state ran a multimillion-dollar, multi-platform campaign to convince people to wash their hands. Which worked better, the corporate marketing scheme or the public-private one? By Prahalad’s own admission, “although scalability seems to be greater with the [public-private partnership], benefits to corporate sales lie with” paid marketing efforts. In other words, while profits were best served by a corporate campaign, greater health impact came by way of taxpayer-funded social marketing.25
So none of the nine cases Prahalad held out as paragons of “eradicating poverty with profits” were any such thing. Either they didn’t serve the poorest people, or they didn’t make much of a profit. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. We already know how hard it is for the private sector to deliver services to poor populations on its own. For instance, despite many experiments by determined entrepreneurs, there isn’t a system in the world that delivers universal health care or universal education without at least some support from the public sector. Private efforts either fail to generate enough revenue to keep going, or have to swim upstream to richer waters.
What’s most twisted about Prahalad’s logic is the suggestion that poor people can somehow consume their way out of poverty. As if their poverty were a function of what they can buy, not what they can earn. Karnani more sensibly argued that the best way to support poor people was to help them become higher-income producers, not consumers.26 Well-paid employment makes people richer. Godfather of microfinance Muhammad Yunus has come to a similar conclusion and urges social activists to start what he calls “social businesses.”27 They differ from Prahalad in seeking to employ low-income workers, not just sell to them.
Asocial Enterprises
Prahalad has had some influence in corporate circles, but it’s a variation of his idea called “social enterprise” that has really taken off. In business schools, engineering departments, and venture capital firms, social enterprises – start-up businesses that try to serve a social good through a viable business – are all the rage. Social entrepreneurs model themselves on the Steve Jobses and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world, not realizing that successful businesses are successful because they have carefully chosen their customers, not because they have a foolproof Midas touch. Apple is a profitable company not just because it designs superior products but also because it chooses the world’s wealthiest people as its market. It would hardly survive if it were constrained to selling $400 iPhones to individuals who earn less than that in a year. Even ad-based business models only work if advertisers are willing to pay for ads, which they won’t do if the eyeballs belong to people who lack disposable cash.
Toms Shoes has found a way around this problem. Its founder, Blake Mycoskie, is considered a social-enterprise pioneer. Toms is a for-profit company whose marketing strategy – touted in boldface at the top of its website – is “one for one”: For every pair of shoes sold, Toms donates a pair to a “person in need.”28 The firm is wildly successful. Since its founding in 2006, it has handed out over 10 million shoes, which implies cumulative revenue of about half a billion dollars. It has recently expanded into eyeglasses with the same one-for-one promise. Bill Clinton once introduced Mycoskie – whose rakish good looks recall Jim Morrison – as “one of the most interesting entrepreneurs [I’ve] ever met.”29
Despite its performance, Toms has also come under scathing criticism. Some say that giving away shoes to poor communities stunts local economies and perpetuates a culture of dependence. Others note that Toms could redirect its giving to something more lasting than straw-and-canvas shoes. Even if their gifts cost just $5 each to make and transport, that’s still $50 million that could have been better spent. Still others find Toms to be little more than a sweatshop, exploiting cheap Chinese labor and photos of barefoot children for hefty profits.30
There is some truth to these points, but the real problem is deeper and subtler. I suspect Mycoskie’s critics wouldn’t be mollified that he has responded to them by opening factories in countries where he gives away shoes.31 There is something more insidious at work.
Though Toms trumpets its commitment to addressing “hardships faced by children growing up without shoes,” it’s not very open about what customers are actually paying for. Toms doesn’t disclose its financial statements. What we do know is this: Thanks to a recent agreement to sell 50 percent of his stake to Bain Capital, Mycoskie stands to gain as much as $300 million on top of whatever he’s paid himself so far as sole owner and CEO.32
Imagine if you made a $50 donation to a nonprofit, and out of that, say, $10 went to the cause while $10 came back to you as a thank-you gift and $30 facilitated the executive director’s multimillion-dollar bonus. You wouldn’t stand for it. Yet this is effectively the Toms “business model.” And from it, the founder not only richly profits but then is weirdly hailed as a social activist’s hero. Something doesn’t seem quite right, and a comment made by a principal at Bain Capital – the same company that cast a dark shadow on Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign – provides a clue why: “We believe that the one-to-one promise is fundamental to the brand.”33 Or, to put it another way, Toms is successful because of a cynical marketing pitch catering to slacktivist consumers who equate generosity with purchasing two cheaply made pairs of shoes and giving one away.
In the end, Toms is a shoe company with a social responsibility arm. Mycoskie deserves credit for being a shrewd entrepreneur and spending some of his growing fortune on charity. Otherwise, though, Toms is not that different from Nike: They both sell overpriced shoes to brand-conscious customers, exploit cheap developing-world labor to pay their executives well, and spend a portion of their revenue on charitable causes (in Nike’s case, on the nonprofit Nike Foundation).
But Toms does one more thing: By misleadingly presenting itself as primarily interested in charity, the company diverts the goodwill of people who might otherwise engage more deeply in a cause. In what psychologists call moral self-licensing, people use past good deeds – even minor ones – to excuse future apathy.34 So there’s a good chance that many Toms customers skimp on more worthwhile efforts, something they probably wouldn’t do if they bought their shoes from Nike, which runs its own social responsibility initiative but with less self-congratulatory fanfare. The greater jeopardy, though, is a broader societal self-licensing: By playing up efforts like Toms, we as a society fool ourselves into believing that the world’s problems can be solved by enlightened consumerism.
That’s the problem with social-enterprise hyperbole in general. Its noisy buzz draws attention away from effective government and nonprofit approaches to social causes.35 Large aid agencies such as United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Ford Foundation have begun spending their precious funds on for-profit entities. They hope that their one-time donations will turn into everlasting economic engines that also churn out public goods. As Jonathan Franzen observed in his novel The Corrections, “The more patently satirical the promises, the lustier the influx of American capital.”36
It’s just not true, though, that not-for-profit models can’t have sustainable impact at scale: Most developed countries have government-subsidized universal health care.37 Even Rwanda has national health insurance that covered 92 percent of its population in 2010.38 In 2011, 91 percent of the world’s school-aged children were enrolled in primary education, most of them in government-subsidized schools.39 The International Committee of the Red Cross has helped “victims of war and armed violence” around the world for over 150 years. It raises more than $1 billion a year, almost entirely through private donations.40 Other nonprofits, such as CARE, Goodwill, Human Rights Watch, Oxfam, and United Way, are similarly large and effective. However much governments and nonprofits are criticized for their waste, none of them generates $300 million payouts for their chief executives and pretends that’s an effective way to direct goodwill.
I’ve participated in several social enterprise competitions as a coach, mentor, or judge. Talented twenty-somethings feverishly pitch projects, hoping, like Blake Mycoskie, to “do well by doing good.” The projects are tested mainly for their financial sustainability (read “profitability”), their scalability (read “market penetration”), and novelty and uniqueness (read “potential monopoly power”). In the mad rush to conjure money out of hoi polloi, the “social return on investment” often becomes an afterthought. It’s as if there’s no point to saving lives or teaching children if you have to keep paying to do so.
Real social change is no easier to achieve with social enterprises than with not-for-profit models. The hype, though, allows business success to be confused with social impact.
Happiness and Its Discontents
Social causes seek economic prosperity, social justice, human dignity, and expanded freedoms, so packaged interventions aim for these goals, too. But what if the goals are themselves misguided?
In 1972, King Jigme Singye Wangchuk of Bhutan proposed an alternative measure of progress. He announced that instead of Gross National Product, his country would judge itself by what he called Gross National Happiness. And before we deride a young king of a small, far-off land for his idealism, it’s worth remembering that Thomas Jefferson, representing a once young, once far-off land, enshrined “the pursuit of happiness” as an inalienable right on par with life and liberty.
Jefferson and the Bhutanese king knew what they were talking about. Philosophers have proposed happiness as the highest good and the ultimate goal of human activity at least since the Buddha and Aristotle. A couple of thousand years later, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill expanded the notion to whole societies. In their utilitarian philosophy, the goal is the greatest good for the greatest number.
Amazingly, in the past decade or so even no-nonsense economists have started taking happiness seriously. Neuroscientists such as Richard Davidson have shown that certain kinds of brain activity – measurable by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) – are correlated with self-reports of happiness.41 Alluding to this work, the eminent British economist Richard Layard wrote, “Now we know that what people say about how they feel corresponds closely to the actual levels of activity in different parts of the brain, which can be measured in standard scientific ways.” Satisfied that happiness was real, Layard wrote an entire book arguing that happiness, not wealth, should be the basis for public policy.42
All of this adds to an ongoing case made by scholars, policymakers, and activists who argue that today’s dominant metrics of national progress are deficient. In 1995, The Atlantic asked, “If the GDP Is Up, Why Is America Down?”43 The country collectively repeated that question in 2009. GDP recovered from the recession, but employment didn’t. A good metric should correlate with the overall well-being of a country. What’s the point of a metric that increases while so many people are miserable?
King Wangchuk was ahead of his time. There’s no point to wealth or social change unless they lead to greater happiness. War, illness, hunger, thirst, poverty, oppression, ignorance, unemployment, and powerlessness are problems in great part because they’re obstacles to happiness. Prosperity leads to the material requirements for happiness. Justice seeks the moral conditions for happiness. Dignity lays the material and political basis for happiness. And freedom, as Nobel-laureate economist Amartya Sen wrote, allows people to live “lives we have reason to value” – that is, lives we think would make us happy.44 If there were a community of poor, ignorant, marginalized people who were nevertheless always happy, we wouldn’t feel any need to help them. In any case, they probably wouldn’t want our “help.”
With this recognition has come a wave of public interest in private happiness. Books with titles such as Authentic Happiness, Stumbling on Happiness, The Happiness Hypothesis, and The Happiness Project are proliferating, competing to counsel us on how we can individually be happier.45 Global leaders have also turned to happiness and related concepts. In 2009, French president Nicholas Sarkozy commissioned a group featuring five Nobel Prize winners to devise a metric that captured true quality of life.46 In 2010, British prime minister David Cameron prompted his government to start measuring happiness.47 And at his second inauguration in 2013, President Barack Obama reprised Jefferson: “That is our generation’s task – to make . . . life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness real for every American.”48
The Ant and the Grasshopper
If you had to suppress a giggle at the mention of Gross National Happiness – or perhaps you didn’t even bother to suppress it – you’re not alone. Happiness seems like cotton candy, pink and fluffy. It calls to mind a laughing young satyr prancing about in some meadow while others hunker down to the serious business of life. Scholars try to make happiness more respectable by calling it “subjective well-being,” but that doesn’t make it any less fluffy.
What taints happiness? One problem is captured in Aesop’s tale of the ant and the grasshopper. During the summer, the grasshopper sings and frolics while the ant toils to prepare for winter. Come winter, the grasshopper suffers in the cold while the ant sits comfortably fed in his lair. In the original Greek fable, when the grasshopper knocks on the door, the ant tells the grasshopper to go dance and shuts the door in his face.49 In modern versions of the story – cleansed of unhappy endings – the ant takes the grasshopper in, and the grateful grasshopper realizes the error of his ways.
Most people would agree that it’s the ant who is happier in the long run, even though it’s the grasshopper who seems explicitly focused on happiness. In other words, short-term pleasure often leads to long-term dissatisfaction. That intuition underlies the psychologist’s distinction between hedonia and eudaimonia. Pleasure-seeking hedonism is questionable, but maybe long-term eudaimonic life satisfaction is good.
But is that enough? Modern psychological tests of happiness, which policymakers increasingly rely on, ask questions about current mood and life satisfaction so far. According to these measures, happiness depends on the present and the past.50
Yet the future is where all of our potential happiness lies. If happiness is present mood and present satisfaction, then efforts to increase happiness will tend, grasshopper-like, to focus on today, not tomorrow. This is exactly what is recommended by the recent spate of happiness literature. Take The How of Happiness, in which leading positive psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky lists 12 Happiness Activities and 5 Hows Behind Sustainable Happiness. The latter include positive emotion; variety in life; social support; motivation, effort, and commitment; and habit. The first two are clearly present-focused, and even the last three are upon closer reading. Consider motivation, effort, and commitment. These sound more ant than grasshopper, but Lyubomirsky gives the section only four pages of which just one is dedicated to the question “What if you’re too busy?” Her answer is to do simple things that take no additional time, such as “observing your job, partner, and children with a new, more charitable and optimistic perspective, saying a kind word to your spouse, distracting yourself when you find yourself dwelling on something, uttering a short prayer before a meal, smiling at strangers during your commute, empathizing with someone who has hurt you, and so on.”51 Nothing in the section suggests that motivation, effort, and commitment require motivation, effort, and commitment. Like so much positive psychology, all Lyubomirsky recommends are fleeting attempts to improve one’s present mood.52 There is nothing about practicing habits of courage, diligence, or integrity that might enhance future happiness. And in the course of her 350-plus pages, only ten are devoted to creating more happiness for others through kindness. Even there, the main concern is how kindness promotes one’s own happiness, not others’. So, according to one of the world’s foremost happiness experts, happiness is not about laying the foundation today for happiness tomorrow or happiness for others, but to do more as pop musician Bobby McFerrin sang: “Don’t worry, be happy.”
Happiness may be the intended end of all human effort, but as Aristotle recognized long ago, it is a by-product of other activity. You might be as happy as a grasshopper today, but it’s only through careful preparation that happiness lasts through the winter. McFerrin was wrong. If “the landlord says your rent is late,”53 the right response isn’t not to worry. It’s to move in with a relative, live on a tighter budget, get another job, upgrade your skills, apply for public assistance, or do anything else that would sow, antlike, a future in which there would be less cause to worry.54
Measure for Immeasure
At first glance, randomized controlled trials, social enterprise, and happiness as an objective have little in common. The first is a research methodology, the second a type of organization, and the last a policy goal. Yet these three concepts share traits that recall the problems of technologies and packaged interventions.
For one thing, they all make a fetish of measurement. Randomistas look down on knowledge not gained through quantified experiment. Social enterprises are pushed to reduce their impact to a number. Happiness gained currency only when social scientists developed metrics for it. And whether it’s vaccines injected, laptops issued, loans disbursed, or ballots submitted, one reason why packaged interventions are popular is that they are easy to count.
Measurement undoubtedly helps us verify progress. There’s a danger, though, of worshipping the measurable at the expense of other key qualities. We can know the number of mobile phone accounts, but we can’t know how many life-changing conversations they’ve carried. We can count votes, but we can’t tell how many citizens will risk hazards to protest injustice. Someday these intangibles might be quantifiable, but even then, much will remain unmeasured. As the saying goes, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”55
If so, it’s important that we acknowledge here and now that important but numberless qualities will always exist, and that we account explicitly for that fact in our decision-making. Unfortunately, in our world of big data, we are losing sight of bigger wisdom. As more kinds of numeric data become available, we focus only on the numbers and neglect qualities that don’t come with measurable outcomes.
Technocrats like to say that “if it can’t be measured, it can’t be managed,” but this is simply not true. Most of us manage our relationships with friends and family without measurement. (And you’d worry about anyone who needed metrics to manage relationships.) Many countries have experienced dramatic economic growth well before they have had a system of national accounts.56 Surely, Homer thought of his Iliad as much more than 15,693 lines of dactylic hexameter. The important thing is to establish meaningful goals first, whether or not they can be measured. Where direct metrics don’t exist, there might be indirect proxies. And where there aren’t proxies, there should be a judicious weighing of measurable and unmeasurable factors. It’s foolish to neglect metrics where they’re available – but to think that only what’s measurable is meaningful is pure sophistry.
The Tech Commandments
The problem with measurement obsession is the obsession, not the measurement. The drive for lower-cost books squeezes out all but best sellers. A mania for RCTs crowds out complementary approaches. Social enterprises distract from other paths to charitable action. Near-term happiness diverts us from long-term foundations. A tunnel vision on technology steals attention from nontechnological essentials.
In the hype surrounding these technocratic approaches, certain biases appear and reappear constantly. They are the distortions of our technological and technocratic age – what could be called the Tech Commandments:
• Measurement over meaning: Value only that which can be counted.
• Quantity over quality: Do only those things that affect millions of people.
• Ultimate goals over root causes: Focus narrowly on the end goal to ensure success.
• Destinationism over path dependency: Ignore history and context, and take a single hop to the destination.
• External over internal: Do not expect people to change; instead, focus exclusively on their external circumstances.
• Innovation over tried-and-true: Never do anything that has been done before, at least not without new branding.
• Intelligence over wisdom: Maximize cleverness and creativity, not mundane effort. Use intelligence and talent to justify arrogance, selfishness, immaturity, and rankism. (Rankism is abuse, humiliation, exploitation, or subjugation based on any kind of social rank.57)
• Value neutrality over value engagement: Bypass values and ethics by pretending to value neutrality.
• Individualism over collectivism: Let competition lead to efficiency; avoid cooperation, which breeds complacency and corruption. Any inhibition of individual expression, including compromise to support the common good, is the same as oppression.
• Freedom over responsibility: Encourage more choices; discourage discernment in choosing. Any temperance of liberty, including encouragement of responsibility, is tantamount to tyranny.
This is an exaggeration, I’ll admit, but not an extreme one. I’ve been in hundreds of discussions about global poverty with academics, entrepreneurs, nonprofit staff, program officers, and government ministers. With striking regularity, someone will invoke some version of these points to justify their pet intervention with smug certainty of its power. Technocratic zealots aren’t satisfied by seeing their point of view acknowledged; they want it to prevail. In this, they call to mind Larry Ellison, the cofounder and CEO of Oracle, who once said that he modeled his business tactics on Genghis Khan. “It is not sufficient that I succeed,” he said. “All others must fail.”58
Belief in the Tech Commandments isn’t limited to technologists, packaged interventionists, or devotees of RCTs, social enterprises, and happiness. Nor is it confined to any one group.59 It permeates social-cause circles on the political left and right, in the private and public sectors, among secular philanthropists and religious charities.
The Tech Commandments aren’t easy to counterbalance, because they contain kernels of truth. It would be pointless, even dangerous, to argue against metrics, innovation, or freedom per se. But as the Delphic oracle advised, medem agan – nothing in excess. Balance is utmost.
Teaching to the Test
The imbalances of the Tech Commandments creep into our systems little by little. Over time, however, they can snowball into major crises.
One example of this tendency is teaching to the test. A struggling school system prompts a narrowing of goals. The focus shrinks to reading, writing, and mathematics, which seems sensible enough and incurs little partisan controversy. Then, to measure progress at large scale, standardized tests are used as benchmarks. Pretty soon, raising the metrics becomes the only goal. Under pressure to increase scores, schools turn to quick fixes: technologies and methodologies that drill students in minor variations of common test questions. However, rather than fostering curious, productive, well-informed, and well-adjusted citizens, the mindless drilling erodes students’ motivation to learn.
Meanwhile, these changes prompt parents with means (as well as parents with vouchers) to send their children elsewhere – to private and charter schools. This response institutionalizes a two-tiered system that only aggravates the original problem. What started as an attempt to save a challenged school system is undermined by the technocratic overemphases on measurement, large scale, external change, individual choice, and supposedly value-neutral change.
This pattern generalizes beyond education. A struggling public effort prompts a narrowing of goals. The focus shrinks to improving health care, education, or economic output, which seems sensible enough and incurs little controversy. Then, to measure progress at large scale, the goals are benchmarked by mortality figures, average years of schooling, or income and GDP. Pretty soon, raising the metrics becomes the only goal. Under pressure to perform on the metrics, governments, donors, and civil society turn to quick fixes: technologies and methodologies that supposedly raise benchmark scores. However, rather than fostering independent, productive, neighborly citizens, packaged interventions delivered from the outside erode communities’ own capabilities.
Meanwhile, high-status communities disregard the inconvenient aspects of the same packaged interventions they peddle. This response institutionalizes a two-tiered system that only aggravates the original problem. What started as an attempt to cause positive social change is undermined by the technocratic overemphases on measurement, large scale, external change, individualism, and supposedly value-neutral change.
The Dimming of Enlightenment
I want to be clear that I’m not attacking technocratic goals in and of themselves. Technocratic ideas have become popular because they have profoundly altered human civilization in some very positive ways.
If you plumb the history of technological invention and large-scale social change, a lot of it can be traced to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe and the historical period known as the Enlightenment or the Age of Reason. The Enlightenment saw an explosion of intellectual activity and laid the basis for the Industrial Revolution. Everything from steam engines to seaworthy clocks, from telescopes to barometers, emerged from that time. But the Enlightenment was much more than a burst of technology. Books about the era would fill entire libraries, but to compress it all into a Facebook post: In scholarship, the Enlightenment ushered in the reign of science and reason over superstition and dogma. In culture, it exalted meritocracy and pluralism. In economics, it gave backing to property rights and national growth. And in government, it brought down dictatorships and gave birth to democracy.
These ideas were reactions to the prevailing unwisdoms of autocracy, imperialism, superstition, prejudice, and economic stagnation. Enlightenment ideas served as a counter to dogmatic rituals and monarchies that thrived on the backs of an uneducated, untitled population. Scholars of the Enlightenment routinely say that the period gave birth to the idea of external progress as something that was both desirable and systematically achievable for humanity as a whole.60 That is in contrast to the world before the Enlightenment both in and out of Europe – a time when it wouldn’t be too gross a generalization to say that human brainpower tended to focus on internal change. Ancient Greek philosophy and Judeo-Christian tenets ruminated on personal virtues. Confucian principles emphasized social harmony and respect for hierarchy. Indian religions stressed karmic forces and spiritual advancement.
Before the Enlightenment, major civilizations came and went on all the continents except Antarctica. None of them, though, built anything like the rich intellectual edifice on which the modern world was constructed.61 History has its twists and turns, but you can draw a straight line from the ideas of the Enlightenment to the contemporary world. Isaac Newton and others paved a highway for science and technology with their explorations into the laws of motion and electromagnetism. Baruch Spinoza and Jean-Jacques Rousseau laid the philosophical cornerstones of modern democracy. John Locke’s arguments for property rights and Adam Smith’s analysis of markets undergird contemporary capitalism.
And thanks to those foundations, some portion of the world gained more prosperity, justice, dignity, freedom, happiness, and peace than any civilization that came before. In 2006, global GDP was $50 trillion, with the rich OECD countries producing three-quarters of that dizzying sum. Most developed-world citizens had their basic needs met. Few struggled for food or shelter. Life expectancy at birth was seventy-seven years (well above the fifty-five-year life expectancy for the least developed countries, or the thirty-nine years of, say, Massachusetts residents in 1850). Most OECD countries were democracies with rule of law and basic human rights protections. While some were engaged in war abroad, peace reigned at home. And the Global Values Survey found that citizens of the richest countries were consistently happier than their counterparts in poorer ones.62 So 2006 was a great year for beneficiaries of the Enlightenment. It seems only natural that we should keep doing more of a good thing.
Yet, just a few years later, things look much darker. We remain mired in an economic slump that is dragging down both spirits and bottom lines. In 2013 the world burned 33 billion barrels of oil (about half of them in the rich countries), chugged 207 billion liters of soft drinks, and cut down 1.4 million acres of Amazonian rain forest, and all of these things contributed on a colossal scale to pollution, climate change, a looming resource crunch, and poor health around the world.63
What’s more, the world’s richest, freest, happiest people are the ones who are most responsible for these problems. On a per capita basis, Americans consume as much as thirty-five times the natural resources of their developing-country peers.64 And the world’s financial troubles can be linked to the excesses of Wall Street, where people live like demigods and buy their own justice. It seems that prosperity, justice, dignity, freedom, happiness, and peace do not guarantee themselves – either forever or for everyone. If anything, it’s our success with these desirables that increasingly infringes on our neighbors and on our own future.
How could something so good have gone so wrong?
Essentially, we took the progressive ideas of the Enlightenment and forged them into a rigid technocratic orthodoxy. We are unable to entertain alternatives to tech-driven, capitalist, liberal democracy, so we pronounce it the ultimate salvation.
But if Adam Smith’s invisible hand spurs economic growth, it also pickpockets from the commons. Moral relativism permits plural virtues but also plural vices. Meritocracy rewards talent and diligence but neglects the collective responsibility to nurture those traits in everyone. We rationalize our faith on the basis that it leads to the common good, all the while winking at the foibles it indulges.
Minor character flaws then weave a tragic destiny. To be sure, a value-free pluralism is better than monarchic oppression, but it is still not enough to ensure the public good. Wall Street bankers and global mining companies are un-oppressed, and free to trade pretty much as they wish, but in the daily choices they make between protecting the public good and fattening their bank accounts, does anyone truly believe they are choosing for the good? And if not, why do our dearly held convictions still support them? Why do we get excited about innovations such as high-speed electronic trading, even though they achieve little apart from amplifying greed and reinforcing undeserved advantage?
When Sarkozy announced his quality-of-life commission in 2009, he said, “We’re living in one of those epochs where certitudes have vanished. . . . [W]e have to reinvent, to reconstruct everything. The central issue is [to pick] the way of development, the model of society, the civilization we want to live in.”65 Whatever his flaws, Sarkozy put his finger on the core quandary of modern global society. We need a better story about what progress is and where we go from here. The Enlightenment served its purpose, and many of its technocratic values are worthwhile. But now we’re clinging.
Unfortunately, Sarkozy’s commission was a twenty-five-member group composed entirely of economists. To be sure, they were eminent economists, led by Nobelists Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen.66 But, while economics in the abstract can be construed as a science of human well-being, economics as it is practiced today is a monstrous hydra of rational-agent models, linear utility functions, oversimplified regressions, dollar-based metrics, conflation of meaning with measurability, and can’t-help-itself support of free markets – and its many heads reassert themselves despite routine failures.
Again, it’s not that technology, packaged interventions, RCTs, social enterprises, happiness, scalability, measurability, and technocratic ideas in general are bad in and of themselves. Rather, the trouble is cultism and imbalance. New vaccines are good, but not while health-care systems go unfunded. Educational technology might be helpful, but not if good teachers and institutional support are lacking. Elections are great, but not if social norms and government institutions don’t support democracy. Technocratic means might be a part of the solution, but with so much attention on them, who’s working on the other parts?
Balance is utmost, but balance is difficult even to talk about in a world of polarized sound bites.67 Novel, measurable, large-scale, turbo-charged, value-free, market-oriented packaged interventions for freedom-drunk, goal-driven, meritocratic individualists dominate our notions of social change. This creed has been terrific so far for those of us who have benefited. But the world’s persistent challenges and imminent crises suggest that what got us here won’t take us further. For a more enduring humanity, we need a better narrative of progress.