Geek Heresy (40 page)

16
.
  
A Georgetown economics professor and former director of the World Bank’s Development Research Group, Martin Ravallion (2011), best summarizes some of the difficulties with RCTs. A more academic critique is offered by Nobel economist James Heckman (1997). The problem I raise in this section is a special instance of the external validity problem as well as the tendency to do experiments that are convenient to run, but not necessarily the most revealing.

17
.
  
Most RCTs focus on evaluating the effectiveness of specific packaged interventions. I’m not aware of any RCTs to date that test the idea that a capable organization is the key to making a given packaged intervention work. Such a study could be done, in theory, but to remain within the epistemological constraints of hard-core
randomistas, it would require a treatment that measurably improved organizational capability within the duration of the study. An experiment like that would not be cheap or easy to implement, especially because organizational capability takes a long time to improve and is difficult to measure. These are severe practical limitations of RCTs. The studies that get done are invariably the ones that are cheaper, shorter term, easier to find metrics for, and easier to run.

18
.
  
Rossi (1987).

19
.
  
If I could change one thing about RCTs conducted by economists, it would be this: The larger context in which the RCT was run should be reported in detail, and there should be explicit, thorough discussion about expected external validity. What are the relevant aspects of local culture, history, geography, climate, etc.? If there were partner organizations involved in the trial, what were their unique strengths and weaknesses when compared with similar organizations? Under what conditions should readers expect to see similar outcomes?

20
.
  
Prahalad (2004).

21
.
  
Ibid., p. 16.

22
.
  
Ibid., pp. 4–16.

23
.
  
Ibid., p. 4.

24
.
  
Karnani (2007), p. 93, Table 1.

25
.
  
It also turns out that low-cost sachets are not great for business after all. Since Prahalad’s book, soap, shampoo, and all manner of detergent were increasingly sold in small, low-cost packets. This set off multiple price wars between HLL and Proctor & Gamble, resulting in the odd phenomenon that the price per volume of shampoo, for example, became lower in small sachets than in large bottles. An HLL executive once confessed to me that they gained market share but lost in terms of absolute net profits; they wanted to get out of the sachet business but couldn’t see a way to do so. Indeed, a search online for “India sachet price war” returns many articles suggesting this point.

26
.
  
Ibid.

27
.
  
Yunus (2007).

28
.
  
Toms (n.d.). The exact wording on the company website as of September 2014 was “One for One: With every product you purchase, Toms will help a person in need.”

29
.
  
Toms (n.d.). The one-for-one model means they must have sold 10 million pairs to donate as many. Their shoes are priced between $40 and $100, which translates to $400 million to $1 billion in total revenue.

30
.
  
Bansal (2012) and Butler (2014) provide good summaries of Toms Shoes criticism. Wydick et al. (2014) ran an RCT to test whether shoe donations caused households to buy fewer shoes, but with inconclusive results. Murphy (2014a) interprets the results in context of the criticism.

31
.
  
Toms (n.d.). Toms began with manufacturing in China, and has since expanded to Ethiopia and Argentina. Mycoskie has also announced a plan to start a factory in Haiti. In more than thirty other countries where Toms donates shoes, however, no factories appear to be planned.

32
.
  
O’Connor (2014).

33
.
  
Rupp and Banerjee (2014).

34
.
  
Merritt et al. (2010) provide a wonderful overview of the research on moral self-licensing. Of note, self-licensing occurs even when all that a person does is make a public statement of good intention, which is particularly relevant for Toms Shoes and other purchases where apparent proof of goodness is publicly visible.

35
.
  
To be clear, I’m not against capitalism. Capitalism is a terrific economic engine, and the developing world could benefit from more for-profit companies. (One problem with firms like Toms is that the owners are rich-world people, while their workers are not.) But capitalism on its own concentrates wealth (and therefore power) in the hands of a few, as so many have noted, from Karl Marx to Thomas Piketty (2014). Other forces are needed to spread growth widely, whether it’s cooperatives, unions, progressive taxation, universal provision of basic needs, private charity, or a combination of these and other factors. Social-enterprise hype glorifies market mechanisms and therefore crowds out important approaches that come with few extrinsic rewards. We need more of what liberation theology calls a “preferential option for the poor” (Farmer 2005, p. 139).

36
.
  
Franzen (2010), p. 439.

37
.
  
Fisher (2012).

38
.
  
McNeil (2010).

39
.
  
UNESCO (2012). That still leaves over 50 million children out of school, though.

40
.
  
International Committee of the Red Cross (2014).

41
.
  
Richard Davidson is a leader in the field of affective neuroscience, which seeks out the physiological underpinnings of emotion. Two papers discuss the link between activity in the prefrontal cortex and subjective positive mood: Davidson (1992) and Davidson et al. (2000).

42
.
  
Richard Layard’s (2005) book is a superb, easy-to-read introduction to the modern economist’s view of happiness.

43
.
  
Cobb et al. (1995).

44
.
  
Sen (2000), p. 14.
Development as Freedom
makes a powerful case that socioeconomic growth comes through the provision of freedoms and capabilities. Ultimately, though, the underlying philosophy provides an apology for liberal free-market democracy, with no discussion of the responsibilities that individuals must also cultivate. This book’s Part 2 is a response to Sen that could be called “Development as Wisdom.”

45
.
  
Seligman (2002), Gilbert (2006), and Haidt (2006) are among psychology’s foremost scholars of happiness and “positive psychology,” and each brings his unique perspective. Rubin (2009), who is not a psychologist, tried a wide range of happiness tips in her own life for over a year. All of these authors acknowledge the importance of character and virtue as a cause of happiness, but in a demonstration of exactly the tendency I critique in this section, they focus more on tricks to improve present mood or to reinterpret the past. They spend surprisingly few pages on character and virtue: Seligman has an 8-page chapter on “Renewing Strength and Virtue”; Gilbert spends 3 pages explaining that virtue and happiness are different; Haidt’s “Felicity of Virtue” section is 25 pages out of 244; Rubin, surprisingly, spends the most time on virtues in the form of everyday habits. Still, many of those habits are again habits to improve present mood, and as Hoffman (2010) notes, she says little about the upbringing that allowed her to have a blessed life.

46
.
  
Wall Street Journal
(2009).

47
.
  
Bentley (2012).

48
.
  
Obama (2013).

49
.
  
See, for example, Perry (1990), pp. 183–184. The original story has a cicada instead of a grasshopper, but I use the grasshopper here because it is more familiar to American audiences.

50
.
  
Ed Diener has led much of psychology’s attempts to define and measure subjective well-being. Two of his coauthored works offer great summaries of what is known: Diener et al. (1999) and Diener and Biswas-Diener (2008).

51
.
  
Lyubomirsky (2007) epitomizes the positive psychology movement, which, though it is based on good science, seems primarily concerned with mental tricks to uplift one’s mood, rather than the hard work of laying the groundwork for a happy life. Admittedly, I have cherry-picked from her book to make my point, but the unpicked fruit is not that different. Her book, and positive psychology as a whole, has a tendency to neglect important virtues in favor of easy lessons drawn from the latest research studies. For example, Lyubomirsky devotes roughly the same amount of space to “expressing gratitude” and “practicing acts of kindness,” though the latter seems dramatically more involved and more likely to increase happiness in the world. It also doesn’t help that at every turn, she takes pains to mention how little effort happiness requires – acts of kindness can be “small and brief,” and “many of the happiness activities do not actually require you to make time.” But isn’t this expectation of happiness without investment one of the problems of modern society’s widespread unhappiness?

52
.
  
For a scathing attack on positive psychology and superficial recommendations for happiness, see Barbara Ehrenreich (2009). She chronicles her exasperation
with the Pollyannaish positive psychology she encountered during her battle with breast cancer.

53
.
  
Wikipedia (n.d.), “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Worry,_Be_Happy
.

54
.
  
I don’t mean to be unsympathetic to people who can’t pay their rent despite doing everything they can to make a decent living; nor am I denying structural causes of poverty. Some social circumstances are nearly impossible to make work. My point, rather, is that there is no simple path to happiness, and simply redirecting our aim toward happiness doesn’t in and of itself address the cause of unhappiness. If anything, it can be counterproductive by drawing our attention to short-term fixes rather than to long-term foundations.

55
.
  
The Internet has amplified both our penchant for catchy fake quotations and our ability to verify actual sources. Variations of this quotation are often attributed to Albert Einstein, but thanks to O’Toole (2010), I was able to trace its true source to sociologist William Bruce Cameron (1963), p. 13.

56
.
  
The United States grew to be a major economic power well before we were able to measure GDP. In the 1930s, the economist Simon Kuznets architected the first system of national income accounts. Since then, GDP has taken on a life of its own in exactly the ways that Kuznets cautioned against. A good account of his warnings and our failure to take them into account is offered by Rowe (2008).

57
.
  
Rankism – the root of all forms of discrimination and abuse of power – is nicely defined and demolished by Robert W. Fuller (2004).

58
.
  
Quoted in Fisher (1988). The quotation, though widely attributed to Genghis Khan, is probably not his (O’Toole 2012).

59
.
  
The Tech Commandments are increasingly shared by people of all political backgrounds, but they do have a decidedly libertarian flavor. George Packer (2013) notes Silicon Valley’s libertarian leaning. Anyone who believes in technology and free markets alone to redeem politics and social challenges, though, needs to travel more. If you have technology, markets, and freedom without a strong state, you have Somalia.

60
.
  
Deutsch (2011) makes a scientist’s case for the critical role of the Enlightenment.

61
.
  
The seeds of the Enlightenment itself might have been planted earlier – Gutenberg’s press, for example, was invented in the mid-1500s, at least a century before the Age of Reason. Colonization, which contributed to Europe’s economic development, began in the 1400s. Nisbet (1980) traces the idea of progress back to ancient Greek civilization. Nevertheless, it seems safe to say that elements of today’s Tech Commandments were first given concrete voice during the Enlightenment – a point that is made by many whom Nisbet (1980) cites.

62
.
  
Data in this paragraph comes from the following sources. GDP: World Bank (2012a), data for 2006 GDP world and OECD member countries. Life expectancy: United Nations (2007); US Department of Commerce, US Census Bureau (1949). Democracy: Kekic (2007). Happiness: Inglehart et al. (2008).

63
.
  
US Energy Information Administration (2014a);
Economist
(2014); MarketLine (2014).

64
.
  
Estimates for this ratio are hard to track to primary sources, and few sources provide the units of comparison. The per capita figure comes from Scheer and Moss (2012). Diamond (2008) notes a ratio of thirty-two times the natural resources. United Nations Environment Programme (2011) puts the ratio at ten times by weight in natural resources. Whatever it is, developed-world consumption, and American consumption in particular, is much, much higher than developing-world consumption. Poorer people, by necessity, know how to make a little go a long way.