Chapter 8: Hierarchy of Aspirations

The Evolution of Intrinsic Motivation

1.  Sandberg (2014), pp. 296–297.

2.  Economists will point to the behavioral scientists in their midst and insist that their field knows money isn’t everything. But it’s telling that even the behavioral economists’ favorite piece of evidence for this claim is the game of Dictator, in which one person allocates a pot for two players – a pot of money. In the most common form of Dictator, one player (the dictator) is given some cash – say, $10 – along with instructions to split the money in whatever way he chooses with the second player (see, for example, Camerer and Thaler 1995). Over many experiments in various contexts, and to the jaw-stretching astonishment of mainstream economists, it has been found that people in the role of the dictator frequently choose to give the other player some of the money (Henrich et al. 2004). This fact upends the standard “rational agent” model of economics, which assumes that people are moved purely by self-interest and would therefore keep the entire pot for themselves.

3.  Oxford English Dictionary (2013).

4.  The sample survey was conducted by market-research firm Synovate. Nathalia Rodriguez Vega helped me analyze the data. The exact wording of the survey question was, “Among those things that you have some control over, what would you most like to change about yourself or your life over the next five years?” Over the years, I’ve found this wording to work best even in translation. (The word “aspiration” itself can be confusing or hard to translate.)

It’s possible that people might not mention aspirations they have that are less than good, but if so, the responses still show that people know what a good aspiration is (i.e., the response reveals something true even if the respondent has what psychologists call “social desirability bias”). Even when similar questions are asked of gang members, mafioso, and dictators, they typically reveal positive intentions, though their means to achieve them might be crooked. See, for example, Venkatesh (2008).

5.  Deci and Ryan (1991).

6.  For an overview of these results, see Sheldon and Houser-Marko (2001) and Sheldon and Elliot (1999). Sheldon and Elliot (1998) also find that people persevere more at intrinsically motivated goals. The finding that the greatest gains come from following intrinsically motivated goals occurs in Sheldon and Kasser (1998).

7.  This process is also confirmed by Sheldon and Elliot (1999): “Those who are progressing well in their goals during a period of time are accumulating activity-based experiences of competence, autonomy, and relatedness during that time, more so when their goals are self-concordant.”

8.  Richard Auty (1993) first identified and named the resource curse. Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner (1999) linked the resource curse to economic stunting.

9.  The “Dutch disease” was so named by Economist (1977), according to Wikipedia’s article on “Dutch Disease” (n.d.), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease.

10.  Erling Larsen (2004) discusses how Norway appears to have avoided the resource curse, though there are indications that it’s not fully clear of Dutch disease. Meanwhile, Norway’s admirable contributions to international aid are documented in many places. Revkin (2008) notes how it upped its aid contributions during a recession.

11.  Agyare (2014).

12.  I met Awuah when I taught math at Ashesi in 2002, and we’ve had many discussions since then about university education, Ghana, and development. The stories of Awuah and Ashesi throughout this book are based on our conversations over the years as well as stories I heard from other Ashesi affiliates, including Nina Marini, Ashesi’s founding vice president. More about Awuah and Ashesi appears in the following: Easterly (2006), pp. 306–307; Dudley (2009); Lankarani (2011).

13.  The quotation is at best a very loose translation of Goethe from what first seems to appear in Corelli (1905), p. 31. Lee (1998) provides a fuller explanation.

14.  See Easterly (2006), pp. 306–307. Awuah has otherwise won a number of honors for his work, including an honorary doctorate from Swarthmore in 2004; the John P. McNulty Prize in 2009; and the Integral Fellow Award from the Microsoft Alumni Association.

15.  This oft-cited finding goes back to Isen and Levin (1972) and was popularized by, among others, Schwarz and Strack (1999). I mention this pioneering work not because its conclusions are wrong or unimportant, but because it is a prominent example that emphasizes the short-term impact of the external environment. No such single study is a problem in itself – the problem is that such studies are increasingly prioritized (because they’re easier and cheaper to run) over studies of slower-changing, internal traits and are becoming disproportionately influential in policy.

16.  For the canonical exposition of behavioral economics’ “nudges,” see Thaler and Sunstein (2008), who popularized the term. Their notion of “libertarian paternalism” is among the gentlest conceptions of manipulation, and most of their ideas are undoubtedly worth implementing. But is that all we’re going to ask of ourselves? Can’t we go beyond nudging one another?

17.  Psychologists’ notions of personality development differ from the “personality development” that I have encountered in some social change efforts, especially outside of the United States. Psychological personality development is concerned with how human beings mature across a number of psychological attributes throughout their lives. “Personality development” in Indian development circles is about the development of soft skills and the outward expressions of education and middle-class membership. The two definitions overlap, but the latter implies a somewhat more superficial type of development than the former. There are three-month courses in India for “personality development” (that succeed at their stated goals), but few psychologists would suggest that personality development is something that can be completed in a three-month course.

18.  Freud (1962) proposed a psychosexual theory that took a child through oral, anal, phallic, latent, and genital stages, each layering the libidinous id with a self-protecting ego and an angel-on-the-shoulder superego. Erik Erikson’s (1950) psychosocial theory featured a series of eight crises, whose successful resolutions led to trust, will, purpose, competence, fidelity, love, caring, and, ultimately, wisdom. Jean Piaget investigated the developmental stages for logical thinking and scientific ability (Piaget and Inhelder 1958). Lawrence Kohlberg was inspired by Piaget to investigate stages of moral development (Kohlberg et al. 1983).

19.  I don’t claim that all such change always moves in a positive direction. Sometimes, someone of praiseworthy achievement decides to make a terrible step backward in intrinsic growth – a prominent example is Bernard Madoff, whose hedge-fund pyramid scheme cheated his investors out of billions. Nevertheless, my main point here is that forward growth and maturation is not an unusual thing. Contrary to anyone who believes that human nature is fixed and economically focused, positive human change at an individual level is common and often not at all about money.

20.  See, for example, Haggbloom et al. (2002). Their ranking shows Maslow as the fourteenth most cited psychologist in introductory psychology textbooks, the nineteenth most revered by other psychologists, the tenth most eminent in a final analysis, and the thirty-seventh most frequently cited.

21.  Maslow (1954 [1987]), p. 22.

22.  Maslow (1943), p. 375, repeated in Maslow (1954 [1987]), p. 17.

23.  Maslow (1943), pp. 388–389, repeated in Maslow (1954 [1987]), p. 28.

24.  Empirical studies of Maslow’s hierarchy show mixed results: Some studies debunk specific aspects of Maslow’s theory, while others uphold them. On the whole, his basic insights have not met with hard counterevidence. Among the most cited critiques of Maslow is Wahba and Bridwell (1976), which summarizes research on evidence for the hierarchy of needs in organizational behavior. But they set up a poor straw man of Maslow, misinterpreting things in exactly the way described in this section. Neher (1991), Rowan (1998), and Koltko-Rivera (2006) provide a better-reasoned set of criticisms as well as links to other critical work. Maslow (1996) himself frequently reflected on his own work. Psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan (1985) make a case for three flat needs – competence, autonomy, and relatedness – without ordering or sequence, but they also leave out needs that span a larger range of human experience, such as survival and transcendence.

25.  A common criticism of Maslow’s theory is that it failed to account for evil. I hardly claim to have a comprehensive answer, but within his framework, one way to explain bad behavior is that when people find it difficult – whether through personal inability, external conditions, or unrealistic expectations – to achieve their needs or aspirations, they act out in ways that are criminal, unethical, and even brutal. Thus, when survival is difficult, some people become savage. When achievement and esteem are not forthcoming, some people choose to cheat. When genuine self-actualization is denied, some people turn to hedonism.

26.  Hofstede (1984) lobs criticism based on the misinterpretation that self-actualization is the peak of human achievement.

27.  Maslow (1965), p. 45, writes, “The difference between the need for esteem (from others) and the need for self-esteem should be made very clear. . . . [R]eal self-esteem rests . . . on a feeling of dignity, of controlling one’s own life, and of being one’s own boss.” Rowan (1998) argues for a split into two levels of the hierarchy of needs, and I tend to agree with him here. Esteem differs from achievement or mastery, and it does seem to precede the more substantive need, which might explain why so many people seem to seek celebrity through reality TV.

28.  The quotation is from Maslow (1996), p. 31. Koltko-Rivera (2006) makes a careful argument that Maslow intended self-transcendence as a separate level, especially in his later years. The beginning of the split between self-actualization and self-transcendence is evident as early as Maslow (1961). However, Maslow continued to wrestle with whether self-transcendence is a separate category in itself, as is evident in his unpublished papers as collected by Hoffman (1996). Maslow wrote frequently of peak experiences and transcendence, but he rarely used the term “self-transcendence.” Maslow (1968), p. vi, contains several occurrences, but as an aspect of self-actualization.

29.  One example of this critique is from sociologist Tony Watson (2008), p. 35, who writes that he fulfills his social and esteem needs before eating, or that his cousin in the army fulfills prestige needs before security. However, these cases are actually cases of advanced Maslovian development (which Maslow called “intrinsic learning” or “character learning”), where a person operating primarily out of a higher-level aspiration is more than willing to sustain a deficiency in a lower-level need, just as many people skip lunch for a job that compels them.

30.  Maslow (1943), p. 375, repeated in Maslow (1954 [1987]), p. 18.

31.  Maslow himself used the word “aspiration” only twice each in Maslow (1954 [1987]) and Maslow (1971).

32.  Maslow (1954 [1987]), p. 35.

33.  Robert Wright’s (2000) conception of a positive-sum return in his book Nonzero is an example. Psychologist David C. McClelland (1961) made a similar case over half a century ago.

34.  In Generation Me, psychologist Jean Twenge (2006) relates trends among those born in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. She finds a generation narcissistically focused on itself, but also tending toward less prejudice and greater self-confidence. These apparently conflicting traits are consistent with a focus on self-actualization, which is at once the height of selfishness and a plateau of good judgment about how to achieve selfish ends. On the other hand, it’s possible to stagnate in self-actualization, which is arguably the danger facing privileged society. This is why it’s important to acknowledge self-transcendence as a further level of human growth.

35.  When exactly a person feels ready to put aside each level of Maslow’s hierarchy is a big question, and current psychology has no easy answer to it. The accumulation of wealth, for example, can serve to satisfy survival, security, esteem, and self-actualization needs to various extents, so success at it often engenders moves toward self-transcendence. Yet it’s clear that there’s no absolute level of wealth that causes the transition. Some billionaires seem stuck on nothing but expanding their empires, while some people of very modest means seem to care for little other than self-transcendent activity. A lot seems to depend on upbringing. Like many other aspects of personality, inclinations harden as we grow into adults.

36.  Duthiers and Ellis (2013).

37.  Bales (2002).

38.  The pressing concern for survival becomes clear if you spend time with poor communities. Vivid accounts of this survival mentality occur in Boo (2012), Collins et al. (2009), and Narayan et al. (2000).

39.  Butterfield et al. (1975), p. 260. John and Abigail Adams kept up a routine correspondence when they were apart. In this letter, dated May 12, 1780, John Adams writes of the well-tended gardens he visited in Paris and Versailles with admiration and a tinge of envy. He marvels at the art and architecture of France, but suggests that the duty he has to studying the science of government precludes him from going into more detail. One wonders, given the prominent role he played, whether it was strictly duty that held him or a deep, personal aspiration.

40.  I don’t mean to suggest that changing careers is a requirement of forward movement. I highlight Agyare and Awuah as exemplars because their intrinsic growth was marked by clearly visible milestones, but the milestones are simply signposts, not a cause or a necessary result of change. It’s possible to undergo dramatic aspirational changes while holding the same job. One reason why it is so difficult to make the case for intrinsic growth is because so many of its effects are not visible, and we increasingly neglect truths not accompanied by tangible metrics.

41.  I make this claim only of the dominant paradigms of economics. Economics is a broad field, so there are, of course, economists who study changes in preferences (such as Matthew Rabin at UC Berkeley), but they are in the minority, and as far as I know, no economist studies a systematic way in which people’s preferences change as a result of psychological maturation. In a quest for the precision of the physical sciences, economists seek equations of human behavior based on measurable variables. Though nothing limits the complexity of mathematical models in theory, in practice the reality of scarce data, intractable mathematics, and an undeniable physics-envy favors oversimplification.

42.  Sandel (2012), p. 85, compiles a series of prominent contemporary economists putting incentives at the center of economic thinking: “Economics is, at root, the study of incentives” (Levitt and Dubner 2006, p. 16); “People respond to incentives” (Mankiw 2004, p. 4). In development, Mankiw’s point is reiterated verbatim by William Easterly (2001).

43.  One exception is Nobel Prize winner James Heckman, who has cobbled together neuroscience and psychology to arrive at an economic model of investing in early childhood education. See, for example, Heckman (2012).

44.  Anthropologists take pains to distance themselves from straw-man interpretations of cultural relativism set up by critics (e.g., Geertz 1984), and I apologize for the overgeneralization in this paragraph. A more nuanced treatment of anthropologists’ relationship to development appears in Lewis (2005). Nevertheless, my experience has been that many qualitative researchers loathe the very idea of societal progress and the idea that one culture can be considered superior to another, especially in any moral sense. I sympathize with the aversion to ethnocentrism and cultural imperialism, but if progress is taboo, it’s impossible to debate the best routes to progress. It seems clear that a culture that engages in child trafficking, for example, is morally and culturally improved by ceasing it. The hard questions are not whether there can be progress or not, but what aspects of culture admit a notion of moral progress (as opposed to nonmoral differences of taste or tradition), and how cultures can engage with one another on moral progress without one culture imperially imposing its own ideas.

45.  Though economists and anthropologists both vehemently insist that they believe in individual agency – or free will – their agents supposedly respond rationally or intelligently to external circumstances, which again pushes the cause of different outcomes to different external conditions, not to different internal states.

Other social sciences have similar debates. Psychology has its person-situation debate, which pits internal personality against external situation as determinants of behavior. Sociologists talk about social structures versus individual agency. And in the public sphere, it’s become fashionable to note the “fundamental attribution error,” which says that behavior is more often a result of circumstances than of some underlying stable personality. It’s obvious, though, that behavior is caused by a complex interaction of both internal states and external situations. Which matters more is difficult to answer in a general way. You can contrive contexts in which one matters more than the other. It’s like asking whether an athlete’s skill or the quality of his/her equipment matter more in her performance, but that depends on the sport, on the athlete, and on the range of skill and quality being considered.

Yet another attack on the validity of nurture comes from those who say that immutable conditions like genetics have more influence. Judith Harris (2009) made this argument for parenting versus other environmental factors. More recently, Bryan Caplan (2012) suggested that parenting mattered little. The problem with these conclusions is that they are looking at a relatively narrow band of human context. Go to a poor rural village in Bihar, and it’s trivially obvious that nurture, education, and culture have a tremendous impact on what kind of adults people become.

In any case, what I’m arguing for is that in the context of large-scale social change, it’s worth working on the internal determinants of behavior, even if they are a small contribution to any given outcome. To the extent that they are slow-changing and self-propagating, their impact will eventually be cumulative and large.

46.  The quotations are taken from the New York Times (2012) transcript of the debate.

Chapter 9: “Gross National Wisdom”

Societal Development and Mass Intrinsic Growth

1.  One negative consequence of labeling is “stereotype threat,” in which people perform worse at tasks when they are anxious about confirming a negative stereotype. Steele and Aronson (1995) were the first to demonstrate this phenomenon. Nothing I say is intended to recommend stereotyping – my whole point is that both individuals and societies can change, and the hierarchy of aspirations specifically outlines how. Stereotypes, to the extent that they color some people as being a particular fixed way, implicitly deny the possibility of change.

2.  See Shoda et al. (1990) and Mischel and Shoda (1995).

3.  If an adult’s self-control is strongly dependent on his self-control as a child, and if child self-control cannot be entirely blamed on the child, then at least some of an adult’s self-control is due to causes beyond his or her agency. In short, at least some portion of a person’s intrinsic development, even as an adult, is due to forces beyond his or her control.

Philosophers such as Galen Strawson (2010) use a stronger version of the argument put forth here to conclude that no aspect of a person is ultimately decided by that individual, and therefore that free will is an illusion. Everything a person does is ultimately determined by outside forces. I believe this explanation makes perfect sense in theory, and as a description of reality, it seems correct. (Philosophically, the real problem with free will is that the notion of a “self” that acts, and that most of us take for granted, is flawed, as Buddhism and some Western philosophers, such as David Hume (1740 [2011]) and Derek Parfit (1984), have argued. Otherwise, we must either posit a decision-making entity that is independent of physical forces – which is the same as assuming supernatural entities such as “souls” – or intentionally circumscribe some portion of our minds as being an internal force that we artificially consider separate from the rest of the universe.)

In any case, blame and attribution remain useful as social forces. Even in a world that is fully determined, blame can serve as an external social force that encourages people to act positively. This conclusion differs from some of the confused thinking about blame as put forth by philosophers such as Barbara Fried (2013) and Strawson, who suggest that because all behavior is externally influenced, no one should ever be blamed for anything. The commonsense notion that adults are more blameworthy than children is socially valuable; yet we also have to keep in mind that they are not entirely blameworthy. (Mischel himself argues that self-control is both predictive and malleable.) That’s the basis from which I proceed in this section and elsewhere.

4.  See, for example, Kraus et al. (2010), Piff et al. (2010), and Piff et al. (2012).

5.  The question of whether external conditions or individual actions matter more is unanswerable outside of specific contexts. It’s easy to imagine two individuals with such different temperaments that they would act differently under just about any circumstance. That example would suggest that individual actions matter more than external conditions. Yet it’s also possible to imagine two individuals who were raised under such different external conditions that one becomes a serial killer and another a saintly hero. That example suggests that external conditions matter more than individual actions. The fact is that both matter, and trying to help either change in a positive direction is worthwhile.

6.  In autocratic societies, some decisions are made by individuals, but even then, a leader rules with some complicity of the people. Even under the most extreme conditions, people – especially collectively – have a choice, even if it is an improbably difficult choice. There’s always the stark option, as they say in New Hampshire, to “Live free or die.”

7.  Actually, although he never visited India or China himself, Weber devoted a book each to their religions. He found both inexpedient as cultural foundations for economic growth, because neither provided a moral backing for entrepreneurial effort. Confucianism stressed individuals’ harmony with their social context (Weber 1915 [1951]), and Indian religions stressed the “unalterability of the world order” (Weber 1916 [1958], p. 326). Weber could be forgiven for coming to these conclusions because this was in the early 1900s when neither China nor India were the economic powerhouses they are today. In any case, his errors suggest that what matters is not a fixed aspect of culture, but something mutable.

8.  Weber (1904 [1976]).

9.  Hindu (2014). In 2008 there were similar levels of excitement for the Chandrayaan, which made India only the fifth country in the world to reach the moon (Indian Space Research Organization 2008).

10.  Wallis (2006) distinguishes between “systematic corruption” – where politicians bend government and tyranny is the dominant fear – from “venal corruption” – where money bends government. Wallis’s research finds that systematic corruption was all but eliminated in the United States by the 1890s and that today’s corruption worries are almost entirely of the venal type. Many developing-world countries today, however, continue to contend with systematic corruption.

11.  Common patterns of progress do not mean that cultures lose their tremendous diversity – today’s Japan is a very different place from today’s United States, and again different from today’s India. But many things about the way modern-day Japan differs from the Japan of a hundred years ago are similar to the ways that the United States differs from the United States circa 1900, or to how rich, urban India differs from poor, rural Hindustan. A rich set of qualitative characteristics tend to change together, if not in lockstep.

In fact, archaeologists and anthropologists often use other stage typologies to discuss societies across a larger timescale: For example, Elman Service’s (1962 [1968]) well-used typology classifies human societies into bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and nation-states. Critics of such theories have paroxysms at any mention that there could be commonalities in the histories of divergent civilizations. But if overgeneralization is a bad habit of some disciplines, undergeneralization is as bad a habit of others. Unless one is wearing the blinders of certain academic ideologies, it’s hard to miss historical commonalities across nations as they develop.

12.  Coontz (2014).

13.  Hegewisch and Williams (2013).

14.  Center for American Women and Politics (2014).

15.  Economic contrarian Ha-Joon Chang (2010), p. 35, writes, “The emergence of household appliances, as well as electricity, piped water and piped gas, has totally transformed the way women, and consequently men, live. They have made it possible for far more women to join the labour market.” This interpretation assumes that household chores should be a women’s job. The real question isn’t whether some technology liberated women from household work, but how changing social norms have changed the ways in which we think about gender and work. (To be fair to Chang, he doesn’t deny the importance of other social causes. He also cuts the impact of the Internet down to size in comparison to home appliances.)

16.  United Nations Development Programme (2013). Ninety-six percent represents 80 out of 83 countries for which there was data in both years. A similar report by the World Economic Forum (2013) tracked global gender disparities with respect to economic participation, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment. Between 2006 and 2013, it found increasing overall gender equality in 95 out of 110 countries (86 percent).

17.  Inglehart has overseen the collection of what is undoubtedly the world’s most comprehensive and rigorously collected data set of subjective values. The analysis he and his colleagues did drives toward a unifying theory that bridges individual psychology and societal change. As influential as Inglehart is in some circles, his work deserves to be much more widely known. Space does not allow me to do his work justice. A superb introduction to his work is Inglehart and Welzel (2005).

18.  The World Values Survey maintains an active website with all of its surveys, data, and a lot of academic analysis (www.worldvaluessurvey.org). For example, questions from the 2005–2006 wave of the World Values Survey (2005) ask on a ten-point scale, from “not at all” to “a great deal,” how much freedom of choice or control subjects feel they have over their lives. Another series of questions asks respondents to rate family, friends, leisure time, politics, work, and religion on a scale of “not important at all” to “very important.”

19.  The bulleted points are excerpted from World Values Survey (n.d.) and slightly edited for readability. Also on the site is the Inglehart-Welzel cultural map, which shows how culturally similar countries cluster on their two dimensions. The map is explained fully in Inglehart and Welzel (2005).

20.  There is no consensus explanation for what causes national development, but it’s widely accepted that civilization itself is predicated on agriculture, since it requires a military class, which leads to ruling and leisure classes. And in more recent history, there is considerable evidence that some threshold of agricultural productivity is a strong predictor of future economic development. See, for example, Sachs (2005), pp. 69–70.

21.  It’s easy to romanticize agrarian life, lived as it is in the beautiful countryside and at the pace of the seasons. But the poor smallholder farmers I have met – as opposed to wealthy people who can afford other lifestyles, but think owning a farm is fun – all voice a desire to have a less taxing, more predictable type of work. There are over 50,000 rural-to-urban migrants in India per day (Indian Institute for Human Settlements 2012). The world crossed a milestone in 2009, when, for the first time in history, more people lived in cities than not (United Nations 2010).

22.  Inglehart and Norris (2003), p. 159.

23.  Inglehart and Welzel (2005), p. 139.

24.  Ibid., p. 33.

25.  Maslow (1954 [1987]), p. 17.

26.  Inglehart and Welzel (2005), p. 37.

27.  Maslow’s hierarchy maps roughly not only to Inglehart’s values scheme, but also to various progressions in other social sciences. There is probably a single psycho-sociological theory that underlies them all, much the way that the biology of blooming flowers can explain the changing colors of a meadow in spring. A correspondence map of various staged theories of human development is provided below. The bottom four are individual; the top four are societal. The theories don’t have a one-to-one correspondence, so the matching is approximate and indicated by a similar horizontal position. Brackets indicate rephrasings of the original term. Italics indicate stages I added to complete each spectrum. References are Rostow (1960); Bell (1999); Florida (2002); Inglehart and Welzel (2005); Fowler (1981); Kohlberg et al. (1983); Fiske (1993) – “Rational Legal” is Pinker’s (2011) rephrasing of what Fiske called “Market Pricing”; and Maslow (1943, 1954 [1987]).

28.  Bhatt (2003).

29.  Saxenian (2006).

30.  These quotations are taken from Florida (2002), pp. 77–80.

31.  Florida (2002), p. xiii.

32.  Ibid., pp. xiv, 74.

33.  Ibid., p. 101.

34.  Ibid., p. 88, quoting open-source advocate Eric Raymond in Taylor (1999).

35.  Ibid., p. 92.

36.  Inglehart and Welzel (2005), p. 159. See also Inglehart and Welzel (2010).

37.  This debate was articulated as early as the 1960s (see, e.g., Weiner 1966). In contrast to Inglehart, Guido Tabellini (2008) argues that more open institutions lead to more open values. For example, the attitudes of third-generation Americans are linked to the degree of autocracy present in their grandparents’ home countries. It seems clear that the causality can go in both directions, with factors mutually reinforcing one another. One thing both Inglehart and Tabellini agree about is that individual attitudes matter. Tabellini (2008) writes, “To explain some political outcomes or the functioning of bureaucratic organizations, we may have to go beyond pure economic incentives and also think about other factors motivating individual behavior.”

38.  Jones (2006); National Center for Charitable Statistics (2010).

39.  Blackwood et al. (2012); Corporation for National and Community Service (2006).

40.  That’s an inflation-adjusted 157 percent increase over the $130 billion in 1973 giving (Giving USA 2014). A nice overview by Perry (2013) reports, however, that giving as a percentage of GDP has remained stubbornly at around 2 percent since the 1970s. It peaked in 2001 at 2.3 percent.

41.  Higher Education Research Institute (2008); Eagan et al. (2013).

42.  Luntz (2009).

43.  The Higher Education Research Institute (2008) survey also shows that the median income of families of college students is 60 percent greater than that of all US families. This fact, together with the group’s inclinations toward “helping others,” suggests a correlation between family income and degree of Maslovian growth, as hypothesized. Also, as Maslow might have predicted, the global recession since 2007 appears to have caused an ebbing of interest in social causes, because external conditions pulled many back to security needs.

44.  Bornstein (2004), p. 4.

45.  Salamon et al. (2013).

46.  Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (2010a).

47.  Development Initiatives (2010).

48.  Higher Education Research Institute (2008) shows that while “helping others” is relatively higher on the agenda now compared with the immediate past, it still trails “raising a family” and “being well-off financially,” which were stressed by 75.5 percent and 73.4 percent of the sampled students, respectively.

49.  I know, because it takes one to know one.

50.  Pinker’s (2011) book is pure genius. It brings together a compelling array of information about historical (and counterintuitive) declines in violence, prejudice, and bad manners and provides carefully reasoned explanations for them. Pinker’s four “better angels” align closely with the three elements of intrinsic growth – empathy and moral reason point toward good intention, reason is discernment, and self-control, obviously, is self-control. His five historical forces, liberally interpreted, are important elements of societal intrinsic growth.

Chapter 10: Nurturing Change

Mentorship as a Social-Cause Paradigm

1.  The right balance of coercion and autonomy in child-rearing is a very complex issue. Similar issues repeatedly arise in mentorship, which is the subject of this chapter. Unfortunately, I have no easy prescriptions for arriving at the right balance, except to say that good discernment is needed.

2.  Tricia Tunstall’s (2012) book Changing Lives is the basis for much of this section about El Sistema. Even if you know nothing about music, the book provides both inspiration and insight for how to create large-scale social change.

3.  El Sistema (n.d.).

4.  This is true however you wish to define social change, and whatever you believe the goals of social change are.

5.  Pradan (2014). Pradan’s impact is difficult to capture concisely because, as will become clear in this chapter, it is so varied. But its success stories are numerous and widespread. Some of them are noted at http://30.pradan.net/.

6.  Pradan doesn’t use the word “mentorship” to describe what it does, but its leaders agree with this chapter’s description of their work and their values.

7.  Many social activists like to use words such as “partnership” and “cooperation” as a way to pretend that their bilateral engagements with others occur between equals. Presumably, the intention is to avoid any neocolonialist arrogance or claims of superiority, which could lead to abuse and exploitation. But abuse and exploitation are a real danger whenever there is a real disparity in power, whether it is acknowledged or not. The problem isn’t power, hierarchy, or status differentials; the problem is abuse. On the whole, it’s better to acknowledge such disparities and to be vigilant against abuse than to pretend that disparities don’t exist at all. The latter is dishonest, and it causes people to drop their guard against exploitation – as so often happens when policymakers conceive of business and trade as being inherently fair (because both sides “voluntarily” enter into the exchange), even though there is plenty of opportunity for exploitation.

Nevertheless, discernment is needed on a case-by-case basis: There are instances when insisting on making the disparity explicit can backfire, as in the case of stereotype threat, a la Steele and Aronson (1995). A strong case for accepting power, but not accepting the abuse of power, is made by Fuller (2004).

8.  Pradan (2014).

9.  Among qualitative researchers, hope has long been identified as a key aspect of a community’s mental health, and anthropologists such as Oscar Lewis (1961) have frequently noted its absence as a trait of many poor communities. More recently, the economist Esther Duflo (2012) noted in her Tanner Lectures, delivered at Harvard University, that some groups of poor people will begin to invest in sustained effort for themselves if they are given a little hope in the form of, say, domesticated animals and carefully tailored support. It’s encouraging to see economists begin to take fuzzy ideas like “hope” seriously, and I hope the scholars who first identified these issues decades ago get the credit they’re due.

10.  See, for example, Bell (2006) and Smyth et al. (2010).

11.  As a side benefit, because mentors don’t set the agenda, mentors are relieved of much of the moral responsibility should bad outcomes arise. (Not that they shouldn’t try to advise against things that might bring them about.) There is a world of ethical difference between telling someone what to do and providing sincere advice when asked for it, particularly if things don’t go well.

12.  We should also be wary of any payment that goes to mentors. Paid mentorship can be easily corrupted into high-cost consultancies of the kind that Washington, DC’s, “beltway bandits” are famous for. The higher the price, the more the “mentor” has a direct stake in something other than the intrinsic growth of the mentee. The more the “mentor” has a stake, the bigger the window for corruption. (Corruption of mission, incidentally, may be perfectly legal; but it’s still corruption.) The most obvious form of corruption among high-priced “mentors” is to place job security over mentee growth. Exactly this dynamic was exposed in 2012 when US Agency for International Development chief administrator Rajiv Shah changed the organization’s policy to purchase more goods and services from local markets, and less from American ones. Groups representing beltway bandits promptly engaged a lobbying firm to fight the policy (Easterly and Freschi 2012). The best mentors offer their services free, at cost, or something very close to cost – certainly not at the maximum price that the market will bear.

13.  Apostle (1984), p. 21.

14.  An exception is former World Bank adviser David Ellerman (2005), who wrote a book called Helping People Help Themselves. His recommendations presage mine, although he doesn’t use the word “mentorship.” David Ellerman sent me an email while I was writing this book, and I visited him at his home in Riverside, California, soon thereafter. His book comes out of his unique experiences in development and at the World Bank, where he saw how a “church” culture of top-down edicts and unified messaging conflicted with allowing countries to determine their own course.

15.  These practices are often good policies, but, strictly speaking, they aren’t mentorship. However, as I note later, it’s possible that within a broad framework of mentorship, incentives could be used as a way to help people come to a realization that something is of value to them. The primary difference between mentorship and manipulation as an approach is that, in mentorship, the ultimate goal is a positive change in the person, not just in the behavior.

16.  In the business literature, there is a rich body of work that agrees on what it takes to mentor well, at least for one-to-one mentoring relationships. I have organized this chapter based on my own experience and observations, but the recommendations do not deviate significantly from practical guides such as Brounstein (2000), Johnson and Ridley (2008), Zachary (2012), or from the academic literature (see, for example, the International Journal of Evidence-Based Coaching and Mentoring, with a website at http://ijebcm.brookes.ac.uk/).

Another field in which mentorship is taken very seriously is youth development. See Rhodes (2008) for a good review of the impact of youth mentorship, and The Chronicle of Evidence-Based Mentoring (http://chronicle.umbmentoring.org/) for related articles. A survey of over 30,000 college graduates by Gallup and Purdue University (2014) found that good mentorship in college matters much more for engagement in the workplace and overall well-being than what college a person attends.

Pawson (2004) includes links to mentorship in the context of international development.

17.  The International Coach Federation (n.d.), for example, defines coaches as those who help “individuals or groups [set and reach] their own objectives.”

18.  For more on Farmer Field Schools (FFSs), see, for example, Davis et al. (2010), which reviews the literature on FFSs and reports on a study of FFS impact in East Africa.

19.  Debates rage on about the overall impact of the Green Revolution. Critics suggest that it depleted aquifers, ruined the soil through mono-cropping, aggravated rural inequalities (amplification, yet again), and made developing-world agriculture dependent on developed-world corporations – all valid points. Here, though, I invoke the Green Revolution to discuss its efficiency with respect to its stated aim to improve yields, at which it succeeded. The Green Revolution is often described as a triumph of new technology – seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides – but it was actually a coordinated push on multiple fronts, including large investments in developing research capacity and broad-based agriculture extension. See, for example, Hazell (2009).

20.  Hu et al. (2012). The Chinese extension force was 1 million members strong at its peak, but that number has since decreased. The quality of extension itself has had its ups and downs, but the government’s commitment to agriculture remains strong. The most common criticism of the Chinese system is that it’s top-down. Farmers are often commanded to change what they grow for the sake of national priorities.

21.  Deo’s incredible life story is chronicled in Kidder (2009).

22.  I-TECH (2013) hosts a video where Sethu tells his story, which hints at many elements of good mentorship and its effects. Sethu is also an example of how good mentorship propagates itself.

23.  Tunstall (2012), pp. 71, xi. Abreu’s faith in El Sistema as social development is backed by some evidence of improved school attendance, decreased juvenile delinquency, a high rate of Sistema participants from poor backgrounds, and lower high-school dropout rates compared against non-Sistema Venezuelan teens (6.9 percent vs. 26 percent). All told, the Inter-American Development Bank estimated that every dollar invested in El Sistema was worth $1.68 in social returns, according to Lubow (2007).

24.  The quotation here is taken from Pradan’s (n.d.) online mission statement. Pradan is one of the wisest development organizations that I have come across. (Which is not to say that there aren’t others of similar caliber that I’m much less familiar with. In India, that list probably includes SEWA, MYRADA, Seva Mandir, Gram Vikas, MKSS, Timbaktu Collective, and so forth.) Pradan’s cofounder, Deep Joshi, speaks of his work in terms of “hearts and minds.”

25.  Packaged interventions amplify human forces to produce outcomes. If you interpret this concept in a literal, arithmetic way, your mind’s eye should see a rectangle whose width is determined by the amount of packaged interventions and whose height is determined by the strength of human forces. (In macroeconomics, the Cobb-Douglas function models economic output as the product of technology and human capital [and financial capital], so this literal interpretation is not as crazy as it might seem.) Given a particular rectangle, the optimal way to grow its area is to lengthen the shorter of the two sides. For example, if you start with a 1×5 rectangle, and have one unit to add to either side, it’s better to go for (1+1) × 5 = 10 than 1 × (5+1) = 6.) Therefore, in a world obsessed with technology, it’s the shorter side, the human side, that needs the boost.

26.  The growth of the computing industry could be due to a similar effect within the technology world itself. It’s much, much easier to develop, test, distribute, and be paid for software apps than it is to develop, test, distribute, and be paid for an efficient mechanical engine. As a result, information technology grows by exponential leaps, but automobiles (just to take an example) haven’t changed much. Young people inclined toward engineering might be attracted to computing because it’s the easiest route to fame and fortune. As with everything else, there’s a natural tendency for civilization to warp toward the easiest tasks.

Conclusion

1.  Singer (2009), pp. 3–5.

2.  See, for example, American Red Cross (n.d.).

3.  Easterly (2014), p. 7.

4.  The thrust of Geek Heresy is a form of consequentialist virtue ethics applied to social causes. Philosopher Julia Driver (2001), who lucidly espouses this view, writes that virtue is “a character trait that systematically produces a preponderance of good.” The point of consequentialist virtue ethics is to foster certain tendencies in people for the sole reason that they are likely to result in a better world. Unlike the other major categories of ethics – such as the deontological rule-based ethics championed by Kant, or the utilitarian ethics put forth by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill – virtue ethics acknowledges that knowing what’s right is different from doing what’s right. It focuses more on the attempt to become more capable of ethical action.

Much of Western virtue ethics, both ancient and modern, is muddled by the teleological reasoning generally attributed to Aristotle – that virtues are worthwhile because they are the best expression of what makes us human. Those who see virtue ethics this way see virtues as ends in themselves, and they often speak of human “flourishing” as having axiomatic value. Philosopher Martha Nussbaum (2011), who, together with Amartya Sen established the “Capability Approach” to international development, tends toward arguments along these lines. But flourishing in the absence of a larger goal leads perilously close to an empty high culture or a misguidedly narcissistic conception of self-actualization. More practically, neither Nussbaum nor Sen emphasize the importance of fostering the right intentions in people. They’re focused on providing freedoms, but not on nurturing responsibilities.

My reading of Aristotle, incidentally, suggests that he was actually more of a consequentialist than he is given credit for. Though he does seem to have viewed virtues as noble in and of themselves, he also understood virtues to be at least a partial cause of eudaimonic happiness: “activities in accordance with virtue which play the dominant role in happiness” (Apostle 1984, p. 15). And he began his exposition in his Ethics with happiness as the ultimate good, probably because he meant the rest of his discussion of virtue to be in service of it.

5.  The importance of health systems strengthening is concisely captured in Bloland et al. (2012). Paiva’s (1977) definition of social development was the “capacity of people to work continuously for their own and society’s welfare.” Morozov’s (2013) critique of Silicon Valley’s save-the-world-with-apps mentality is excellent, but the solutions he offers are stronger in Morozov (2011). Ravitch (2011) issues a scathing critique of the “educational reform” movement in American education; David L. Kirp (2013) stresses the importance of basic management and good support of teachers. Easterly (2006) is the most constructive of his otherwise critical oeuvre; Easterly’s (2014) critique of technocratic solutions is similar to mine, though our policy recommendations differ. An overview of the institutional turn is provided by sociologist Peter Evans (2005). There are many philosophers of virtue ethics, but I agree most with Julia Driver (2001). For an overview of communitarianism, see Etzioni (1993).

6.  Wills (2002), p. 36. The quotation is from Madison’s speech at the Virginia Ratifying Convention, June 20, 1788.

7.  Lincoln (1858).

8.  This needs to be said because contemporary secular society has a deep ambivalence about the idea of self-improvement, particularly in America. On the one hand, we admire self-made people, like the fictional Horatio Algers or the real-life Steve Jobs. On the other hand, these people are admired primarily for their technical abilities or their defiance of convention, not for their compassion and virtue. If anything, we chortle at sincere earnestness the way cool kids sneer at the honor society nerds. There’s something about self-conscious moral striving that we belittle. The cause might be cynicism about human nature (human nature can’t change); an over-compensating disillusionment with religion (which virtue reeks of); an aversion to being seen as a Goody Two-Shoes; and inability to acknowledge one’s own moral failures. (As comedian George Carlin [1984] once quipped, “Anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac.”) Even among our most empathetic literary minds, one of the worst condemnations of art and literature is to call a work “didactic” – the faintest whiff of moralizing is considered unsophisticated and undesirable. Coolness is valued more than goodness.

It didn’t always used to be this way, and there are secular cultures in which intrinsic growth is a conscious project. Benjamin Franklin (1986) listed thirteen virtues in his autobiography and went on to describe a weekly report card of virtues he made to keep tabs on his progress. Nothing could be nerdier. Mohandas Gandhi, also in his autobiography, details his “experiments with truth,” in which he works out both theory and practice relating to vegetarianism, celibacy, nonviolence, and simple living. In Japan, you can see conscious attempts at virtue in small details. For example, it’s common to see traffic signs with sincere admonitions to show courtesy to other drivers or to keep the roads clean. (The equivalent signage in the United States has to appeal instead to humor or threats: “Please drive safely – our squirrels don’t know one nut from another.” “Litter and it will hurt: $316 fine.”)

9.  For a catalog of these missteps in international development, I strongly recommend Easterly (2001).

10.  Consider, for example, that Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring – arguably the first milestone of American environmental awareness – was published in 1962, when US per capita GDP was $3,100 in 2012 dollars (World Bank 2012a). Indian per capita GDP today is $1,500 (World Bank 2012b). It will take at least another decade for India to reach America’s 1962 levels even at 7 percent year-on-year growth.

11.  Park (2014) notes this statistic, which is based on data from the World Health Organization (2014).

12.  Kralev (2009).

13.  If the 2014 US-China climate deal was a bit of an exception, it was exactly because President Obama brought with him American willingness to cut carbon emissions. Congressman Henry Waxman said of it, “History may look back and say this was the turning point on climate” (Parsons et al. 2014). Let’s hope it sticks.

14.  Figures are as posted by the US Energy Information Administration (2010) and include only CO₂ emissions from the burning of fossil fuels in 2010.

15.  Francis Fukuyama (1992) contended that liberal democracy represents the “end of history” – the summit and end point of human civilization, which other nations would eventually tend toward. The thesis has been heavily criticized, not least by Fukuyama himself.

16.  Asimov (1942 [1991]), p. 126. Asimov’s thinking about the laws of robotics was philosophically much deeper than presented here, though none of it changes what I’m trying to say in these paragraphs. In a novel called Robots and Empire, Asimov (1985 [1994]) has the robot Daneel formulate a law that supersedes the First Law: The Zeroth Law of Robotics, which says, “A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm,” allows a robot to harm a person it judges will cause far greater harm to humanity. But Daneel (and presumably Asimov) were not comfortable with this ethical can of worms. In Foundation and Earth, Asimov (1986 [1994]) has Daneel effectively retract the Zeroth Law by seeking out a particularly discerning human being to make a tough choice about the direction of galactic civilization. In doing so, Daneel serves as a role model for social activists – we should all be as thoughtful in allowing “beneficiaries” to determine their own fates (though one wonders whether it was sufficient for Daneel to ask just one person to represent all of humanity).

17.  E. O. Wilson (2012), p. 7, often speaks of our “Star Wars civilization”: godlike technology, medieval institutions, and Stone Age emotions.

18.  Asimov (1979 [1991]).