Geek Heresy (13 page)

Beneficiaries form the third group whose willing and able participation is required. But leaders and implementers often overestimate the desire and capability of beneficiaries. Yunus, for example, says of poor households, “All they need is financial capital.”
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Perhaps out of respect, he dismisses any need to train them: “The fact that the poor are alive is clear proof of their ability. They do not need us to teach them how to survive.” He goes as far as to say that training programs
are “counterproductive.”
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Yet several studies hint that no more than a quarter of households eligible for microloans actually take them on – poor people themselves know that they need something more.
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Abhijit Banerjee and his colleagues have found that it’s mostly experienced entrepreneurs who apply loans to business expansion.
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And Vijay Mahajan, chief executive of the Indian microfinance institution Basix, cautions that loans can “do more harm than good to the poorest.”
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People get used to chronic injustices. And impoverished people spend their energies dealing with the travails of daily life. So, just like with anyone else, motivation and ability can’t be taken for granted; they often need to be built up. Everyone wants to live a long life, but couch potatoes struggle to keep up exercise regimens. Most people value education, but few can sustain hours of directed study day after day, year after year, on their own. Everybody wants freedom, but not everyone will risk their own lives on the frontline of protest. Even vaccines, which more or less work upon injection, have no effect if potential beneficiaries don’t want them. In some parts of the developing world, people fear that vaccination campaigns are attempts to sterilize them. And in some parts of the developed world, people resist vaccines out of misguided fear that they cause autism and other problems.
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The Curse of Packaged Interventions

Leaders, implementers, and beneficiaries. This trinity determines packaged-intervention success, but their all-important traits can’t be packaged. No technology includes the empathy and discernment needed in leaders. No law bundles capable implementation. No system guarantees that beneficiaries will want what others believe is good for them. Exactly that which makes a packaged intervention work can’t be mass-produced.

Technologists and technocrats might hear a challenge in that statement. They hate to admit the existence of systemic obstacles that can’t be overcome by sheer brilliance. I’m often approached by young hacktivists who ask me for feedback on their projects. They start by
describing, say, a mobile SMS text-messaging system that would mass deliver health advice to poor families who don’t have access to medical services. I explain to them that poor people are no different from you or me in their tolerance for spam. Assuming that they can read at all, they’ll probably ignore messages from an unknown source. Why would they take unsolicited advice over that of their friends, relatives, or the village priest? Any project like that works only when it piggybacks on some established form of trust.

Similarly, any solution – technological or otherwise – that improves education depends crucially on parents, students, teachers, and principals. Anything that augments agriculture depends on suppliers, farmers, extension officers, and produce buyers. Anything that enhances governance depends on bureaucrats, administrators, leaders, and citizens. The lack of attention to these necessary human factors leads to the broken medical equipment, shuttered offices, and collapsed democracies that litter the history of social causes.
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It’s no exaggeration to say that packaged interventions have a kind of curse. Ironically, it is exactly where there are extreme social problems that the human intent and capacity required to make good on packaged interventions is missing. It’s the subpar schools we most want to fix with computers that lack teachers, principals, or IT staff who can make good use of technology. It’s the dysfunctional governments we most want to replace through elections that lack the institutions, civil society, and armed forces willing to hold up democracy. And it’s the jagged social fissures that we most want to stitch up with laws that lack the interpersonal trust and mutual respect needed for healing.

The Iron Law of Social Programs

Peter Henry Rossi was among the most influential sociologists of the mid-twentieth century. He was a frequent presence in Congress, where his testimony influenced US domestic policy. Colleagues described him as devoted to social causes and ardent about hard evidence. He once stared down a colleague in a public debate and said, “My data are better than yours.”
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After a career spent studying programs intended to combat crime, poverty, and homelessness, he published an unusual paper in 1987 called “The Iron Law of Evaluation and Other Metallic Rules.”
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In it, Rossi made a startling claim. The Iron Law of the title stated, “The expected value of any net impact assessment of any large scale social program is zero.” That is, on average, large social programs show no impact.

Rossi spent much of the paper considering this discouraging conclusion, and his analysis foretold the problems of packaged interventions. He explicitly noted three reasons why social programs so often fail when they go big.
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Rossi’s first two reasons related to bad program design. Either there is a problem with the theory of the intervention, or there is a problem with how the theory is put into practice. These issues correspond to problems of leadership: Those with influence over the packaged intervention have gotten something wrong.

Rossi’s third reason was faulty implementation. One sentence in Rossi’s essay pinpoints what some people today call “pilotitis,” in which social programs seem to do well in pilots, but fail at large scale: “There is a big difference,” wrote Rossi, “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 that YOAA ordinarily has at its disposal.” (YOAA is Rossi’s own coinage; it stands for “your ordinary American agency.”) In other words, pilots often succeed because of the immense talent and motivation brought to bear on a new program. Once the program is handed off to an indifferent bureaucracy, though, it fails. The secret sauce is not in the program specs, but in the implementers.

All That Glitters

What isn’t a packaged intervention? The caring attention of a good teacher. Citizen participation in a protest march. The capable execution of a vaccination program by a well-managed health-care system. A political leader’s decision to do what’s right in spite of pressure from special interests. Human virtues can’t be packaged.

But if packaged interventions don’t include the critical human components of social change, then isn’t it tautological to say that packaged interventions aren’t enough? It does seem pretty obvious. But if it’s obvious, experts of every stripe nevertheless treat packaged interventions as if they were complete solutions. Critical decisions in public policy are made on the basis of this or that packaged intervention. Academics write papers arguing one packaged intervention’s superiority over another. Foundations allocate budget items for specific packaged interventions. Journalists glorify new packaged interventions. And activists push packaged interventions like drug dealers pushing narcotics.

Why do people do this? Many of the reasons are less than noble: Some seek profit. Others, fame. And still others just want to win a proxy war of egos: My program improves a gazillion lives; how about yours?

But even the most sincere, devoted people insist on the glittery magic of their packaged interventions. Take Yunus, a man who cannot but be admired for his lifelong dedication to fighting poverty. He claims that loans are the only thing poor people need: “Giving the poor access to credit allows them to immediately put into practice the skills they already know.”
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He dismisses concerns about whether their skills are sufficient. “Not one single Grameen borrower requires any special training,” he says. “All they need is financial capital.”
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Yunus isn’t the only one. Here is John Hatch, founder of the nonprofit Foundation for International Community Assistance, describing his philosophy of microcredit: “Give poor communities the opportunity, and then get out of the way!”
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Kiva.org
, an online portal where individuals can contribute to loan capital, asserts, “Low-income individuals are capable of lifting themselves out of poverty if given access to financial services.”
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Opportunity International, another large microcredit organization, says simply that microcredit is “a solution to global poverty.”
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The people making these claims, though, contradict their public statements in their own work. When I met Yunus, he spoke of the Herculean efforts required to grow Grameen Bank: nurturing capable borrowers into employees, finding new ways for women to earn income,
spurring house-bound wives to enter public life, and on and on. It was clear he had climbed mountains beyond mountains, all the while holding the hands of his borrowers and pulling them along. Even as he denies that poor people need training, he describes a unique culture at Grameen Bank that all of his borrowers join. At each meeting, for example, they recite “Sixteen Decisions,” ranging from, “We shall build and use pit latrines,” to, “If anyone is in difficulty, we shall all help him or her.”
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Yunus may not think of this as training, but it’s definitely a lot more than just credit. You can be sure that the folks at Compartamos aren’t reciting daily oaths to help their borrowers in times of difficulty.

Yunus is clearly aware of the complexities. Still, something causes him to market an oversimplified partial solution. In this, he is just like promoters of digital technology. Recall Ghonim: “If you want to liberate a society, just give them the Internet.”

These paeans to packaged interventions influence budgets for social causes. Global spending on interventions is hard to track, but even the rough estimates are staggering. According to the Microfinance Information Exchange, which collects financial data from microcredit organizations around the world, in 2012, 1,161 participating microcredit institutions served over 92 million borrowers in low- and middle-income countries with a total loan portfolio of $94 billion.
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That’s a low estimate. Several US agencies have committed $125 million to the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, which encourages the world’s poorest households to exchange their makeshift stoves for less polluting alternatives. A bipartisan bill introduced in the Senate backs the effort. In 2009, Richard Heeks, a professor at the University of Manchester and a pioneer in the study of information technology for international development, cited estimates of IT spending on the developing world ranging from $2 billion to $840 billion, depending on what was counted.
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He concluded that “hundreds of millions of US dollars per year” were devoted to one-off IT projects, and that “tens of billions of US dollars per year” went to IT infrastructure specifically for the developing world. These are large expenditures considering that in 2012, the world’s total foreign aid directed to education was just $12 billion.
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Packaged interventions rule formal efforts to effect social change.

But, as we’ve seen, rigorous studies of both microcredit and PCs in schools show that neither is effective on its own. Widespread use of the Internet isn’t ending poverty or inequality, even in wealthy America. Decades of cookstove design have only produced ineffective or underused models.
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Studies of charter schools show little improvement, on average, over public schools, especially when effects on students from similar backgrounds are compared.
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All of this is to repeat that packaged interventions in and of themselves don’t guarantee positive social change, whatever “opportunities” they may provide.

Nevertheless, once an intervention is wrapped up in a tidy package with a bow on top, it’s hawked as
the
special sauce,
the
silver bullet,
the
alpha and omega. Credit would be an end to poverty if borrowing created jobs and taught people employable skills. Negroponte’s vaccine analogy would be apt if a moment with a laptop ensured years of education. Egypt would be an oasis of democracy if an election were enough to cause good governance.

Of course, technologies
can
enrich lives; voting
can
empower citizens; and microcredit
can
lead to better livelihoods. But “can” is not always “will.” Modern society fetishizes technocratic devices, but it’s a human finger on the on-switch and a human hand at the controls. Why are we so enamored of shrink-wrapped quick fixes? Why do even those of us who know better tout them as real solutions? The reasons run deep and have been centuries in the making.

CHAPTER 5

Technocratic Orthodoxy

The Pervasive Biases of Modern Do-Gooding