Geek Heresy (14 page)

I
n 1987 I moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to enroll as a freshman at Harvard. Bacchanalian parties weren’t really my thing, so I had a lot of time on weekend evenings. It felt a little lonely in my dorm room while loud music thumped its ways through the walls, so I took walks around the city and found that it catered to a vice of my own: books.

At the time there were as many as thirty booksellers in the few blocks that made up Harvard Square. Local tour guides boasted that there were more bookstores per square mile than anywhere else on earth. I remember marinating in the musty smell of McIntyre & Moore, seeking enlightenment at the Thomas More Bookshop, skimming leatherbound copies of Plato at Mandrake, indulging guilty pleasures at Science Fantasy Books, and bottom-feeding at Buck-a-Book. My favorite was WordsWorth on Brattle Street. I spent hours upon hours in its two floor-to-ceiling stories of glorious inventory, all sold at discount.

Today those shops are gone. With no more than seven or eight bookstores left, Harvard Square has lost its bibliophilic bragging rights. Or, possibly worse, with those seven or eight shops, it might still be the Bookstore Capital of the World. Everywhere you look, brick-and-mortar bookstores are being steamrolled under an online juggernaut.

Amazon sold its first book online in July 1995. By 2013 the company captured as much as a third of all US book sales and 60 percent of all e-books.
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Publishers Weekly
, “the bible of the book business,” might as well be called
Amazon Watch
. Between the best seller lists and the book reviews, the articles seem to fall into two categories: shock and breast-beating about Amazon’s latest ploys, and the forced cheer of publishers, librarians, and retailers frantically seeking the bright side of a cataclysm. The collective fear is that the industry will only have room for Amazon, its customers, and a few best-selling authors. Midlist writers and discerning publishers will cease to exist. The infinite variety of genuine literature will be reduced to
Fifty Shades of Grey
. Main Street will never again be a site for serendipitous browsing among stacks of lovingly selected books.

Meanwhile, this angst goes largely unnoticed by consumers. They might remember the neighborhood bookstore with nostalgia, but they’re happy that they can buy new e-books for $9.99 and have access to just about any text at their fingertips. Is there really a crisis in publishing? Maybe old-school publishers just can’t learn new tricks.

Whatever you think of Amazon, you’re likely to assume that digital caused these changes. Here’s a twenty-years-young Internet-only bookseller that almost singlehandedly built the e-book market – what other explanation could there be?

History points the finger elsewhere. The book business has been cutting costs and courting best sellers for decades, leading to plenty of anxiety along the way. After Penguin began mass-marketing the paperback in 1935, George Orwell wrote, “In my capacity as reader I applaud the Penguin Books; in my capacity as writer I pronounce them anathema.”
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Starting in the 1970s, it was Barnes & Noble’s turn to lay waste to the bookselling establishment. With its block-spanning superstores, aggressive discounts, and mail-order sales, the brand grew mighty, eventually acquiring and killing mall mainstays B. Dalton and Waldenbooks, which themselves had stolen business from independents.
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And publishers have been chasing the blockbuster since long before the Internet. In
Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century
, sociologist John B. Thompson highlights an
industry turn toward fewer titles, with each expected to have bigger sales.
⁴
He traces this trend back to the 1960s, when rapid consolidation of publishing houses began. The mega-merger of Random House and Penguin took place in 2013, but Random House itself is an amalgamation. It swallowed up Ballantine, Bantam, Crown, Dell, Doubleday, Fawcett, Fodor’s, Knopf, and so on down the alphabet.

In short, Amazon and its digital ways are an extrapolation – an amplification – of pre-digital patterns. On the one hand, more books of greater variety are being published. There is a growing population of writers, and publishing is being commoditized.
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On the other hand, the books that receive widespread attention and land on best seller lists are a dwindling proportion of the total. The first trend is sometimes called “the long tail”; the second represents a “winner-take-all” economy.
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Commentators tend to highlight one or the other of these phenomena, but both are happening at once. Together they cause the shrinking middle that is the hallmark of any industry – music, movies, manufacturing – whose product can be replicated and distributed cheaply. Indeed, in the book business it is widely acknowledged that fewer and fewer authors are able to make a living through writing. The squeeze, however, long predates digital tools.

Amazon’s case reinforces a consequence of the Law of Amplification: Technology trends aren’t always
technology
trends. They often have a pre-digital history. Amazon is an extension of a larger book industry driving toward cold efficiency at the expense of less tangible merits. Mix in digital technology, and something like Amazon is sure to come along. (And it would come again, if Amazon were to perish.)

To understand Amazon properly, it’s not enough to know its technology tactics. You also have to know the history of paperbacks, the expansive aggression of Barnes & Noble, and the inclinations of print publishers, which, even as Amazon threatens them, are cut from the same cloth. You have to look at the non-digital context.

Similarly, to better understand our technology fixation, it’s important to recognize its larger social and historical context. As I began to doubt the hype around packaged interventions, I wanted to see if I could bypass their problems. Maybe there were other approaches to social change. So
I engaged with three ideas that have growing support – randomized controlled trials, social enterprises, and happiness as a goal. These are largely unrelated efforts, but they all have great merit and are well-regarded within their specializations. Promisingly, each had a potential claim to exorcising the curse of packaged interventions.

The Randomista Revolution

In July 2011 I visited a school in Kotra, a little village in southern Rajasthan. The small hut had white plaster walls and a thatched roof. About twenty children wearing bright blue uniforms sat on the floor in two circles, one led by a male teacher while the other quietly worked arithmetic problems. I kneeled next to a couple of the students and watched as they marked small slates of blackboard with chalk. They were practicing subtraction with three-digit numbers. A couple of students stumbled over borrowing a one from the next digit, but most of them worked the arithmetic correctly. They were focused, and the teacher was attentive.

The school was operated by a nonprofit called Seva Mandir that has nurtured rural communities in two districts of Rajasthan for over forty years. I was there to visit a project I had read about in a research paper.
⁷
The paper’s first author had an innovative idea to combat teacher absenteeism, and it was tested in Seva Mandir’s schools: Teachers would take digital photographs of themselves and their classes at the beginning and end of each day they were at school. Then, the teachers’ pay would be linked to the number of days each month for which they supplied photos. To prevent teachers from cheating, the researchers devised special tamper-proof digital cameras.

It was an interesting idea, but what brought me to Rajasthan that day was not the use of digital technology per se. I had already seen hundreds of technology projects by then. What made this project unique was that world-renowned researchers had used a rigorous methodology to establish something that seemed to contradict the Law of Amplification. The research team was led by Esther Duflo, a brilliant MIT economist who counts among her honors a MacArthur “genius grant”
as well as the John Bates Clark Medal, a good predictor of future Nobel laureates. As a pioneering member of the Abdul Lateef Jameel Poverty Action Lab (JPAL), Duflo has been a tireless advocate for the use of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to verify the value of antipoverty programs. This is the methodology used in clinical medicine, whereby a control group establishes a baseline against which the effectiveness of a treatment can be compared. In applying the rigor of hard science to social questions, Duflo and her colleagues are revolutionaries. Rivals and supporters have nicknamed them “randomistas.”

In a paper describing the effort, Duflo and her colleagues reported dramatic results. As expected, attendance was captured by the cameras, and teachers showed up more often to class. And the teachers’ consistent presence encouraged students to show up, too. Two photos a day kept absenteeism at bay.

But reducing absences isn’t the end goal – better education is. And here the experiment had an even more impressive outcome. Compared with students in a control group, the students in the camera-monitored classrooms performed better on tests of math, reading, and writing. The teachers who bothered to show up for the photos must have stayed to teach, and, apparently, their teaching was effective. This finding is striking, because other studies of developing-world schools – including one by Duflo herself – show that time sitting in classrooms doesn’t always translate to significant learning.
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For me, Kotra offered new hope. Maybe in some circumstances, technology could work wonders on its own. In this case, the cameras seemed to cause strong educational outcomes with no special attention paid to teachers. Maybe I was premature in declaring the futility of isolated packaged interventions. I was curious about the tamper-proof cameras and what it was about the project as a whole that made it work. Could its lessons be generalized to other contexts?

Packing Tape, But No Packaged Teaching

After the class in Kotra, I asked the teacher to show me how he took the class photos. He took a camera out of a cabinet and flipped through
photos on the display. Each showed a teacher standing at attention next to three rows of uniformed students. As the teacher handed the camera to me, I was a bit disappointed to find that the “tamper-proof camera” turned out to be unexpectedly low-tech. It was an inexpensive Yashica digital camera with cellophane packing tape placed over the controls.
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Still, the pristine condition of the tape suggested that the tamper-proofing achieved its purpose.

Something else I learned on that visit, though, caused far greater disappointment. The authors wrote, “Our results suggest that providing incentives for attendance in nonformal schools can increase learning levels.”
¹⁰
The paper was sure to please anyone who believes in meritocratic rewards for individual effort. It was titled “Incentives Work,” and it attributed all the educational gains to the differential pay provided to teachers for photo-proven attendance. If you had only the paper to go by, you’d believe that wherever there is high teacher absenteeism, incentive pay for photo-validated attendance would be sufficient to improve learning. As JPAL’s website puts it, “If teacher attendance can be improved this should flow through into improved test scores.”
¹¹

But this finding may not stand up in even in Kotra, much less in low-income villages elsewhere. The researchers neglected the full context of the project. After visiting the school, I spent a few hours with Seva Mandir staff at their offices in Udaipur. By then, I had seen many of their other initiatives, and it was clear that Seva Mandir was a devoted, well-run organization that worked small miracles in almost all of its programs. I wondered if what I saw with the camera-monitoring program wasn’t so much a counterexample to the Law of Amplification as yet another instance of it. Maybe the results weren’t caused by the camera program alone, but by the camera program as implemented by a strong organization committed to quality education.
¹²

Conversations with the staff confirmed my hunch. When Seva Mandir began working with schools in Kotra several years before the study, the teachers were inexperienced and their lessons poor. In keeping with the pace of rural life, parents didn’t care much about either teacher or student absenteeism. For years, Seva Mandir worked
extensively with the schools, teachers, and parents to improve pedagogy and to persuade everyone involved of the value of daily attendance.

By the time camera monitoring was put in place, the teachers were more motivated and effective than when they had started. They were operating with a level of commitment and ability rare in rural India. The teacher I met in Kotra, for instance, was far more skilled than others I had seen in government schools. His lesson was pitched well, and he encouraged the right kind of interaction.
¹³
So, while camera-monitored, attendance-based pay surely had its impact, the educational benefits came on top of years of effort by Seva Mandir and the Kotra community.

None of this is mentioned in the paper. There is only one paragraph about the groundwork that Seva Mandir had laid prior to the trial, and it focused narrowly on the efforts surrounding teacher attendance, not on the other painstaking labors to improve teacher capacity or community expectations. As a result, the paper leaves the impression that camera monitoring is the only thing you need to implement in order to improve learning in schools. In effect the study attributes the nutritional value of a whole meal to dessert alone.
¹⁴

Originally, I saw in RCTs the hope of transcending the limitations of packaged interventions. Duflo and other randomistas discourage broad theories to guide social change. Instead they encourage lots of experiments to see what works.
¹⁵
It’s a sensible, data-driven approach, and, as a result, RCTs are seeing a surge of popularity. Not only economists but political scientists and sociologists are now running more RCTs.