Geek Heresy (12 page)

Good credit depends on at least two things: the care with which the loans are made, and the economic capacity of the borrowers. This is true of any loan. Grameen Bank is known to take immense care with its loans. Many of its borrowers are undoubtedly benefiting.

But which ones? A closer look at the economists’ data shows that positive effects tend to favor certain subgroups. Microcredit is more beneficial for those with greater wealth and education; for those with existing businesses; and for those with entrepreneurial skills and temperament; and, in some communities, for the men more than for the women, probably because of other sociocultural advantages.
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In other words, like digital technologies, microcredit also amplifies human forces.

But microcredit isn’t a concrete thing like hardware or software. What is doing the amplifying? In essence, it’s a prescribed process for making cash loans. In its classic form, microcredit is based on lending to groups of people who offer a social guarantee instead of financial collateral. Formal banks make loans to the whole group, often mediated by microfinance institutions. The group then distributes smaller loans to individual members. Borrowers support one another in making loan payments and apply peer pressure to ensure that individual members pay.

By bundling a method of small-scale loan-making into a standard package, microcredit is like a technology.
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As a packaged intervention, it has spread far and wide. Its reach, though, outpaces its positive impact. When microloans are promoted as ends in themselves, essential elements of pioneering programs such as Yunus’s are often forgotten. Those elements, I have come to believe, are the same ones we neglect when we invoke technology to solve a social problem.

Democracy in a Box

Packaged interventions come in all shapes and sizes: iPads to supply children’s education; condoms to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS; and you may have seen ads from organizations such as Oxfam and Heifer International asking you to donate a goat – great as food and fertilizer source for a poor farming family.

But, as with microcredit, packaged interventions aren’t limited to physical goods. They can be abstract ideas or institutional structures: school vouchers, charter schools, home mortgages, elections.

Elections are hailed as the means to achieve democracy, and US foreign policy seems fixated on having other countries hold them. Few events provoke the media frenzy as a nation’s first election.

Recent events in the Middle East and Afghanistan, though, remind us how little voting accomplishes in and of itself. Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya overthrew their dictators and held elections for new leaders, but it’s far from clear that democracies will follow. Egypt, for example, elected Mohamed Morsi in its first elections after the 2011 revolution, but Morsi was subsequently ousted in a military coup. Libya broke apart into fiefdoms controlled by regional militias. Meanwhile, even when the world’s strongest military power ousts despots and supports elections – as America has done in Iraq and Afghanistan – the results are often corruption and violence.
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Most political scientists and foreign policy wonks shudder at glib faith in elections. They point out that democracy requires much more than voting: the rule of law, a robust free press, widespread education, strong governing institutions, public demand for government responsiveness and transparency, civilian control of the military, moderate levels of wealth without too much inequality, and so on.
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These things are not easy to package, as they depend on prevailing social norms, the personalities of leaders, and other human factors that are hard to replicate, even at gunpoint.

A notable comment along these lines comes from Chinua Achebe, the celebrated Nigerian author of
Things Fall Apart
. Achebe was known for his dislike of Western condescension, but he still acknowledged the
long road ahead for true Nigerian democracy.
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In 2011, he wrote, “Africa’s postcolonial disposition is the result of a people who have lost the habit of ruling themselves, forgotten their traditional way of thinking, embracing and engaging the world without sufficient preparation.” He also wrote, “Restoring democratic systems alone will not, overnight, make the country a success. . . . We also must realize that we need patience and cannot expect instant miracles.”
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Fellow Nigerian and Pulitzer Prize winner Dele Olojede went even further: “If you have a large number of citizens who do not yet fully grasp even the concept of the state, who are largely very poor and uneducated, who struggle daily to survive and [are] susceptible to a $5 bribe, democracy sometimes seems like a sham.” Olojede even wondered about giving every adult the vote, noting that no “reasonably successful democracy” began with universal suffrage.
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Elections don’t guarantee political freedom, accountable governance, national stability, or citizen well-being. Like other packaged interventions, ballot boxes are relatively easy to replicate, but a healthy democracy requires much, much more.

Equality by Decree

A group experiences social, political, and economic discrimination within the country of their birth. Its members suffer from limited job opportunities, physical segregation, and biased restrictions on marriage and family life. Then, with great fanfare, laws are passed to end the prejudice. Yet, while the laws have an undeniable effect, bigotry and social inequities continue for generations.

That is how just about every fight for social and political equality goes.

It’s the story, broadly, of America’s quest for racial and gender equality. In the early 1960s, the United States passed the Equal Pay Act and the Civil Rights Act. The first outlawed wage disparities by sex, and the latter proscribed a range of discriminatory practices based on race, creed, gender, ethnicity, and national origin. It’s been over half a century since then, and yet, while outright misogyny has decreased, the
gender wage gap hasn’t closed.
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And racial inequality hasn’t gone away despite the election of a black president.

Enduring bias also plagues India. Many of the rural villages I visited were divided into hamlets separated by caste. In some of these villages, strict norms govern physical interaction, some of which recall the rules of kindergarten cooties. For example, people of the
dalit
outcaste are often forbidden to touch other residents, to drink water from the same wells, or even to allow their shadows to fall on upper-caste neighbors. Infringements are met with beatings for the offender and cleansing rituals for the Brahmin.

Modern Indian urbanites often claim not to engage in such ostracism, but that’s true only in a relative sense. From women living in slums, I learned that many upper-middle-class families refuse to hire cooks who aren’t of a particular caste. In elections, there’s a saying that “people don’t cast their votes; they vote their caste.” And in the personal stories I heard at my office, the most common dramas recapitulated
Romeo and Juliet
, with the Montagues and Capulets replaced by rival castes.

Caste discrimination is eroding in India, and some of the shift can be attributed to law. But considering that India’s constitution has prohibited untouchability and discrimination since at least 1950, caste-ist practices are woefully persistent. In much of the country, especially in rural areas, little has changed.

In other words, even laws and policies are a kind of packaged intervention – easy to replicate on a national scale, but still unable to achieve their stated goals on their own.

The Ultimate Package: Vaccines

In any pantheon of packaged interventions, vaccines would reign supreme. They save lives. They work quickly. They don’t need any follow-through. And they’re so effective that other packaged interventions have vaccine envy. Of One Laptop Per Child, Negroponte has dubiously said, “Think of it as inoculating children against ignorance. And think of the laptop as a vaccine.”
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Vaccines are a bit of medical magic, as long as they’re successfully delivered to people who are willing to receive them. Polio has been eradicated in rich countries, but it’s still endemic in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nigeria, and it smites victims in a dozen other African countries. Measles continues to claim over 100,000 lives a year in the developing world, with large outbreaks in Asia and Africa. Why is it that vaccines fail to protect so many, even though they are an ideal packaged intervention?

Could the problem be a lack of vaccine technology? Obviously not – vaccines for polio and measles have existed for decades.

Could it be that the technology is too expensive? It’s true that countries struggling with these diseases can’t spend as much on health care as developed nations do. But the oral polio vaccine, for example, costs no more than 20 cents a dose. It’s affordable even for poor countries. To supply the recommended three doses for all 350 million people living in polio-endemic countries would cost $210 million. That’s not a small sum, but it’s well below the nearly $1 billion budgeted in 2011 alone by the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, a partnership run by the World Health Organization. The program is plainly paying for something more than the vaccine.
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Could it be lack of infrastructure? Vaccine delivery depends on the “cold chain,” the transport of vaccines to individuals under steady refrigeration. It is much harder to provide a good cold chain in environments with poor roads, old trucks, unreliable power, and little access to chilled storage. Yet the nations of the world managed to eradicate smallpox at a time when asphalt, automobiles, and refrigerators were even rarer than they are today.
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Of course, technology, money, and infrastructure are needed. Yet, so often, those things are present, and the desired impact still fails to materialize. It’s no coincidence that countries whose health-care systems are in chaos see more than their share of avoidable illness. The fact that vaccine-preventable diseases still plague the developing world gives the lie to anyone whose faith is placed in packaged interventions in and of themselves.

Humanity Not Included

Though we look to packaged interventions for large-scale impact, the interventions themselves depend on something else. They require a substrate of positive intent and high capacity among individuals and institutions – the exact substrate that is in stunted supply where social challenges persist.

Who forms the critical human substrate? In my team’s educational technology projects, we saw that the key people were the researchers who developed the technology, the teachers who applied the technology, and the students who used the technology. These three groups have analogues in other contexts as leaders, implementers, and beneficiaries.

Leaders are those who have power over a packaged intervention – what form it takes, whether it is applied, and how. They may be nominal leaders, such as government ministers or nonprofit chief executives, or they may be the people who create technologies, devise policies, supply funds, or otherwise influence the design of an intervention.

Few dispute the critical role of leadership. In microcredit, for example, it matters greatly whether those in power – microfinance institution heads, policymakers, investors, and so on – are committed to supporting low-income borrowers. If they allow personal greed – or even an overeager intention to serve more people – to supersede that commitment, the impact will sour. As Yunus noted, when growth became the chief goal of microcredit, “banks needed to raise interest rates and engage in aggressive marketing and loan collection. The kind of empathy that had once been shown toward borrowers when the lenders were nonprofits disappeared.”
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Unfortunately, empathy cannot be packaged, and it doesn’t increase with the size of an intervention. As much as Yunus rails against profit-making microfinance organizations, their rise continues. Compartamos is growing even as it turns a blind eye to the plight of former borrowers. Stories like that of Hernández, the sock-knitting entrepreneur, leave Carlos Danel, Compartamos cofounder and executive vice president, unmoved. “A lot of people have suggested that financial
inclusion can be a poverty alleviation tool,” he said. “We’re not out to prove that.”
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Implementers are the second vital group. Consider again microcredit, whose methodology leaves little room for error. It’s not easy to make small loans to poor borrowers. They have no formal collateral. Borrowers must be organized into groups that hold regular meetings. Loan officers must travel to remote villages, often carrying wads of cash that tempt thieves. Lending decisions must be made on the basis of scant formal documentation. Banks and other sources of capital must be courted. Local law and customs must be obeyed. And all of that activity must break even financially. In fact, microcredit has a niche precisely because this process is too costly for formal banks; they can’t work directly with very poor borrowers without losing money. When it works, microcredit is a marvel of implementation that combines a high-precision process with compassion for borrowers.

Implementers are the individuals and institutions who execute a packaged intervention. They install, operate, and maintain technology. They build, run, and manage institutions. They adapt, announce, and enforce policies. They set up, control, and administer systems. But, as essential as they are, implementers are rarely appreciated. Recognition goes to individual leaders such as Yunus rather than to frontline Grameen Bank employees. Or to Edward Jenner, who identified the smallpox vaccine, rather than to the health workers who administered the doses. Or to Wael Ghonim, who started a Facebook page, rather than to the nameless protesters in Tahrir Square. We could hardly tell the stories of interventions if we had to name every responsible party, but by overlooking implementers, we take good implementation for granted. It’s another quality that can’t be packaged.