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May 10, 2018 - March 8, 2022
Whereas Smith is concerned with external provision, Barcott builds up internal strengths.
But it doesn’t matter whether they can browse engineering jobs on their phones. Online opportunity isn’t always actual opportunity. Of course, Smith herself wouldn’t argue that a tenth-grade dropout from East Palo Alto and a Stanford computer science PhD have the same ability to hack software. Nevertheless, by equating the Internet with opportunity for underprivileged people, she has made a dubious assumption – an assumption that the Internet can make up for severe non-Internet deficiencies.
I wanted to do more than serve the world’s gadget lovers.
2004. I hired a team of designers, engineers, and social scientists.
We began projects in education, agriculture, health care, governance, microfinance, and so on. For education, we started by spending time in rural India’s government schools. They were blighted by absent teachers, broken toilets, and unquestioning parents.
We declared victory, and temporarily forgot about the lack of toilets, the silent parents, and the absent teachers. Projects such as MultiPoint won us awards and recognition.
In the course of five years, I oversaw at least ten different technology-for-education projects.
While PCs can supplement good instruction, they don’t substitute for time with real teachers.
there’s a big difference between learning the digital tools of modern life (easy to pick up and getting easier by the day, thanks to improving technology) and learning the critical thinking skills necessary for an information age (hard to learn and therefore demanding good adult guidance).
All of the content I tutored is available on math websites and in free Khan Academy videos, and every student had round-the-clock Internet access. But even with all that technology, and even at a school with a luxurious 9:1 student-teacher ratio, what their parents wanted for their kids was extra adult guidance. If this is the case for Lakeside students with their many life advantages, imagine how much more it must be the case for the world’s less privileged children.
students have twelve years to reconstruct the world’s profoundest thoughts – discoveries that history’s greatest thinkers took centuries to hit upon. This is not casual play, and it requires directed motivation. It doesn’t matter what flashy interactive graphics exist to teach this material unless a child does the hard internal work to digest it. To persevere, children need guidance and encouragement for all the hours of a school day, at least nine months of the year, sustained over twelve years.
“it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
By the third or fourth session, though, we hit a wall in what they could learn. Everyone was able to type her name in English as well as in Kannada, but the girls weren’t interested in writing anything beyond that.
With just one class per week – their parents didn’t allow more – we couldn’t have taught them more employable skills such as programming or data entry.
I realize that the class foreshadowed what I’d soon find in my own research: the initial optimism that surrounds technology, the doubt as reality hits, the complexity of outcomes, and the unavoidable role of social forces.
So at the University of California, Berkeley, I met with dozens of professors who had studied different aspects of technology and society. I spent hours tracking down dusty, bound volumes in the stacks of libraries across campus. And here is what I learned. Theorists, despite many fine shades of distinction, fall roughly into four camps: technological utopians, technological skeptics, contextualists, and social determinists.
Harvard professor Sheila Jasanoff has voiced the concerns of many in calling out climate change as a by-product of fossil-fuel-driven technologies.
As I looked for some structure to our findings, three factors emerged as necessary for real impact. The first is the dedication of the researcher, not to research outcomes but to concrete social impact.
The second factor is the commitment and capacity of the partner organization. In my research group, we looked for capable, well-intentioned partners who had rapport with the communities we wanted to work with.
The third factor lies with intended beneficiaries. They must have the desire and the ability to take advantage of the technology provided.
they were like any of us who fail to exercise and eat well despite knowing that we should. It didn’t matter whether we delivered the information via text messages, automated voice calls, entertaining videos, or interactive apps. Technology by itself didn’t budge social and psychological inertia.
Social determinism rests on the plain fact that it is people who act and make decisions – technologies do not.
In other words, what people get out of technology depends on what they can do and want to do even without technology.
If a private company is failing to make a profit, no one expects that state-of-the-art data centers, better productivity software, and new laptops for all of the employees will turn things around. Yet, that is exactly the logic of so many attempts to fix schools with technology.
He argued that Twitter was less an effective tool of protest and more a way for the outside world to eavesdrop on the events.
“knowledge gap hypothesis,” in which the authors reported that public-service messaging delivered through mass media was better absorbed by wealthier, more educated households.52
Throughout, it’s people taking action. The device is inanimate.
users nd their behaviors have explanatory power, not decices
So it’s not that technology prevents true connection. The problem is that technology also makes it easy to have thin, empty interactions. In the choice between a challenging intimacy and casual fun, some of us choose the latter. One reason why some people can’t stop fiddling with their phones is something called FOMO – “the fear of missing out.”7 The fear of missing out on a better party, a better evening, a better life.
There’s also ATUS, addiction to useless stimulation; PORM, pleasure of receiving messages; SWAP, seeing work as priority; UTSI, the urge to seem important; and any number of other latent emotional tics that are exacerbated by the technology.
Not only had he saved the company money by avoiding an expensive digital solution, but he had identified the true problem. “I’m an IT guy,” he said, “but some of my best friends have training in anthropology. They are good at seeing the human issues behind technology.”
What is actually happening was predicted by MIT professors Marshall Van Alstyne and Erik Brynjolfsson as early as 1996 – two years before Google and eight years before Facebook. “Internet users,” they wrote, “can seek out interactions with like-minded individuals who have similar values” while minimizing interactions with those whose values differ.
In general, technology results in positive outcomes only where positive, capable human forces are already in place.
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.
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.
When it works, microcredit is a marvel of implementation that combines a high-precision process with compassion for borrowers.
leaders and implementers often overestimate the desire and capability of beneficiaries. Yunus, for example, says of poor households, “All they need is financial capital.”31 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.”
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.
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
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Of course, technologies can enrich lives; voting can empower citizens; and microcredit can lead to better livelihoods. But “can” is not always “will.”
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.
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.
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.
To guarantee these requirements, researchers prefer to run RCTs in partnership with capable organizations such as Seva Mandir – that is, organizations capable of following onerous instructions. But by working with competent implementers, the experiments necessarily occur in special conditions that aren’t common elsewhere.
You can hear reverberations of Rossi’s Iron Law of Evaluation. There is, he wrote, a world of difference “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.”
So none of the nine cases Prahalad held out as paragons of “eradicating poverty with profits” were any such thing.
Karnani more sensibly argued that the best way to support poor people was to help them become higher-income producers, not consumers.
Imagine if you made a $50 donation to a nonprofit, and out of that, say, $10 went to the cause while $10 came back to you as a thank-you gift and $30 facilitated the executive director’s multimillion-dollar bonus. You wouldn’t stand for it. Yet this is effectively the Toms “business model.”
But Toms does one more thing: By misleadingly presenting itself as primarily interested in charity, the company diverts the goodwill of people who might otherwise engage more deeply in a cause. In what psychologists call moral self-licensing, people use past good deeds – even minor ones – to excuse future apathy.34 So there’s a good chance that many Toms customers skimp on more worthwhile efforts, something they probably wouldn’t do if they bought their shoes from Nike, which runs its own social responsibility initiative but with less self-congratulatory fanfare.
All of this adds to an ongoing case made by scholars, policymakers, and activists who argue that today’s dominant metrics of national progress are deficient.
There’s a danger, though, of worshipping the measurable at the expense of other key qualities.
