Tag Archives: review

Wanting to change

Posted on by

Anybody who reads Duncan Green’s excellent blog, From Poverty to Power, won’t be entirely surprised by the approach he takes in his equally excellent new book, How Change Happens. It is based on two pillars. One is Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach to human development (‘the freedoms to do and to be’), and I’ve always thought that when you appreciate its ethical and practical merits, it’s hard to take any other approach. The other is the need for systems thinking when it comes to considering economic policies or other interventions – in any context, really, but certainly in the case of development.

“Change in complex systems occurs in slow steady processes such as demographic shifts, and in sudden, unforseeable jumps,” Green writes. Mostly, change is extremely, painfully slow. It turns out to be impossible to do one thing because another, linked thing gets in the way. Events and crises open the way for the big shifts – being an economist, I think of this in terms of what it takes to move a co-operative game to a new focal point. But even then, the direction of the jump is contingent, messy, unpredictable. It anyway depends on the prevailing climate of ideas and norms – so part of the challenge is to be ready to take advantage of a crisis by having done all the contextual spade work, all the while getting on with the day job of trying to bring about incremental changes in the previous state of affairs.

Needless to say, this does not make for a concise ten-point plan in the final chapter (although it does try to sum up the whole in a ‘power and systems approach’ in the final few pages). The book has some interesting practical ideas, however. I like the principle of looking for ‘positive deviance’ – look for examples of people or activities that succeed against enormous odds, for outliers, and use them as ‘social proof’ so others copy whatever it is. This is exactly the way new technological innovations spread: the ideas are there, a few people try, and others imitate them. There are loads of examples of advocacy and development organisations and initiatives that have been able to implement responsive, adaptable changes (many of these brought Tim Harford’s Adapt to mind). Other suggestions are harder to see how to implement. The book argues that principled leadership matters. I agree. But where is it? How do donors encourage it?

Green concludes that many organisations in the aid world, including his own, need to move away from linear thinking and get wiser to context and the whole complex environment (actual and political) in which they operate. I hope they follow his advice and this book is certainly well worth anyone working in this world reading. The one element missing, though, seems to be the meta-analysis of the development agency ecosystem itself, and the prevailing ideas. For example, how do you get social innovation akin to technological innovation in a world of impact assessment and RCTs? Or indeed combine fleetness of foot with a genuine need to understand ‘what works’? Understanding one’s own cognitive biases or limitations is a tall order. What’s more, the aid world has incentive structures built in that will discourage change. In a variation on the old lightbulb joke (How many psyhologists does it take to change a lightbulb? Only one, but the lightbulb has to really want to change), how change happens is that a lot of people have to want change to happen.

Anyway, there’s no excuse for not reading the book, as it’s also published as an open access pdf. I hope lots of activists read and digest and change their approach, but suspect it will prove difficult for many.

41qmgmtc-bl

Not the smartest animals

Posted on by

The title of Frans de Waal’s latest book is a rhetorical question: Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. De Waal’s deep knowledge shines through every sentence, as does his delight in all the creatures (especially other primates) he has spent his career studying. The book is about the evolution of cognition and emotion in animals (including humans). It particularly debunks Skinner’s behaviourism – mental processes as a black box, but manipulable using reward and punishment. (This of course the approach behind the present fashion for behavioural economics, a fashion I find troubling because some of its enthusiasts do so clearly see themselves as omniscient scientists ordering society for the better by manipulating the choices of their less intelligent subjects.)

I learned a lot from the book, including that the elephant brain is the one with the most neurons (about 3 times as many as we do). The neural differences between humans and other primates are not sufficient to make us unique in all aspects (although we clearly are in some, notably language). De Waal argues we should assume continuity, a spectrum of cognitive abilities between different animals, rather than sharp and wide distinctions. He notes that psychology is moving to accept this assumption, but the social sciences tend to assume human discontinuity – “But what does it mean to be human?” he reports social scientists asking him. “I usually answer with the iceberg metaphor, according to which there is a vast mass of cognitive, emotional and behavioural similarities between us and our primate kin. But there is also a tip containing a few dozen differences. The natural sciences try to come to grips with the whole iceberg, whereas the rest of academia is happy to stare at the tip.”

The scientific project must therefore be to develop a unitary theory of different cognitions, how cognition operates in general, and then in the case of each particular species. The book emphasises two important contributors: sense perceptions (is vision the most important to the species? or hearing, or smell?); and social relations (is it a species with strict social hierarchies, like chimpanzees, or solitary, like the octopus?) “Cognition and perception cannot be separated… they go hand in hand,” he writes. (Interesting to reflect on what this means for AI. The question is not so much what androids dream of as what they see or hear.)

To crown a wonderful book, it ends with a quotation from David Hume: “Tis from the resemblance of the external actions of animals to those we ourselves perform, that we judget their internal likewise to resemble ours; and the same principle of reasoning, carried one step farther, will make us conclude that since our internal actions resemble each other, the causes, from which they are derived, must also be resembling. When any hypothesis, therefore, is advanced to explain a mental operation, which is common to men and beasts, we must apply the same hypothesis to both.” As Hume summed it up, “No truth appears to me more evident than that beasts are endowed with thought and reason as well as men.”

41ikzreoutl-_sx309_bo1204203200_41xmrpmkokl-_sx324_bo1204203200_

The joy of messiness

Posted on by

It’s hard to imagine that Tim Harford ever writes a duff word. His new book, Messy, is a pleasure to read. (It’s published in a couple of weeks but The Economist jumped the gun with a review so I’m going to go ahead with mine now.) Messy is closer in spirit to Tim’s Adapt rather than his Undercover Economist or Undercover Economist Strikes Back. It gathers research and stories from several different fields to weave them into the theme of the title, and make the case for appreciating mess and avoiding tidy-mindedness.

For example, early on the book tells the tale of Robert Propst, an engineer (and much else) who created a design for modular office furniture and partitions for the Herman Miller company – working 150 miles away from headquarters. But his innovative design empowering workers to create their own workspaces was subverted by managers who insisted the partitions stick to 90 degree angles to make regimented lines. The cubicle farm was born. “Propst was left to condemn the peversion of his ideas as ‘monolithic insanity’, ‘hellholes’, ‘egg-carton geometry’ and ‘barren, rathole places’. The account is in a chapter about workplaces, where mess is a sign of individual empowerment and creativity, contrasted with tidy centralisation and control. (Tim has an extract on tidy vs messy desks in the FT Magazine.)

There are many other accounts of mavericks and independent-minded innovators. The book gives examples from military campaigns, creative contexts (such as Bowie’s reinvention of his music in Berlin), business and nature. I particularly liked the example of the way 18th century scientific foresters in Germany tried to measure the forests using the metric of a Normalbaum, or standardised tree. The idea was to make sense of the messiness of the forest by assigning standard sizes to trees so it would be possible to count how many trees of what dimensions there were, and thus assess the total volume of wood. What happened? “The mess of old forests began to be tidied up. The confusing patchwork of threes of various ages and species was replaced with stands of particular species – the Norway spruce was popular – and of a particular age. The foresters lined up the rows to make the forests easier to survey, to police, and in due course to harvest. Dead trees were felled, rotting hulks dragged away, underbrush cleared. The Normalbaum, once a statistically convenient idealisation of a tree, took physical form.” In the short term this was profitable. In the longer term, it destroyed the ecology of the forests. Yields declined, and the Germans by 1968 had a term for it: Waldsterben or forest death syndrome.It’s a terrific, malign example of performativity.

This chapter, called Incentives, has a number of very nice examples of the perverse effects of targetting, with echoes of the manic modernism described in James Scott’s Seeing Like A State, and of the phenomenon known to economics as risk compensation. I’m not sure I agree with the prescription make it messy as a sure-fire fix. One example in Messy is the blurring of how urban space is divided between vehicles and pedestrians. The early schemes suggest a messy arrangement is safer: people take greater care because they are uncertain. But we don’t know what will happen over time as everybody gets used to the new arrangements. On the other hand, it’s hard to disagree with the idea that children need to be allowed to play in non-sanitised, non-health-and-safetied spaces if they are to ever learn to cope with risk in life.

The common theme in these chapters, which on the face of it seem to gather together a somewhat disaparate set of examples of non-conformism, is the need to design for unpredictability or risk, but also for the fact that people (and trees, and the rest of the natrual world) respond to actions and constraints. It is so hard for decision-makers in any context to realise that they are not social engineers, somehow looking down on the world and able to manipulate it. I entirely agree with this, so recommend Messy. It’s right, it’s a pleasure to read, and it’s out just in time for Christmas.51nrnvc3xcl-_sx329_bo1204203200_

Fear of the unknown

Posted on by

It’s a grey, grey day. The nights are drawing in. A gang of crows has settled noisily on the roof of the house opposite, as if sent by Ted Hughes in a bad mood. Most of all, the state of the world in general and UK politics in particular is super-dismaying. So of course I found a blanket and sat down with a book that dropped through the letter box and wasn’t even pre-chewed by the dog before I got to it. The book is An Age of Risk: Politics and Economy in Early Modern Britain by Emily Nacol. Sometimes all you want to do is bury yourself in a scholarly book about 18th century philosophers.

Reaching the chapter on Hume, I read: “Hume understands how hard it is to live with uncertainty. More importantly, Hume is also exceptionally mindful of how, even if humans can push past the morass of uncertainty to identify probable future outcomes, the anxiety proviked by uncertainty remains untouched. He notes in A Treatise of Human Nature that even though uncertainty can trigger hope and fear in individuals, in practice it seems to generate mostly fear and discomfort. And this is true even when people are in possession of relatively sure probable knowledge about the future.”

‘Every thing that is unexpected affrights us,’ he wrote. Like the superb behavioural economist he was, Hume roots this in a diagnosis of cognition.

The book goes on to argue that one of Hume’s aims in writing his essays aimed at a general public was to shift risk attitudes toward recognising the benefits of taking risks, the oportunity for profit in economic ventures. He wanted to open the eyes of the fearful to ‘a counterpoising argument’: “Could such dogmatical reasoners become sensible of the strange infirmities of human understanding, even in its most perfect state, and when most accurate and cautious in its determinations; such a reflection would naturally inspire them with more modesty and reserve, and diminish their fond opinion of themselves, and their prejudice against antagonists.”

Hume specifically discussed the ‘groundless fear’ of open international trade. Nacol argues that he counters this by suggesting that an open attitude to risk-taking will enrich all parties. I wonder how far Hume would get with his argument these days? (NB, rhetorical question).51pmhydbyel-_ac_us320_ql65_

Resisting the temptation of quantum economics

Posted on by

On the train yesterday I finished an enjoyable book, The Quantum Moment: How Planck, Bohr, Einstein and Heisenberg taught us to love Uncertainty by Robert Crease and Alfred Scharff Goldhaber. It’s the book of a course this philosopher and physicist teach to students who are a mix of humanities and science majors, and it concerns the interactions between discoveries in physics and the wider culture. Now, I must confess that, despite the simplification here, I still don’t understand quantum mechanics, condensates, entanglement and all that jazz: it feels like my brain can almost grasp what’s going on but despite straining can’t quite get there. I’m not alone but at least I don’t pretend; the book has nice examples of ‘fruit loopery’, meaningless claims of spurious authority based on the impressive sound of quantum terminology. The idea of there being no ‘out there’ outside the model, from which an expert and impartial observer can analyse everything, has obvious resonance for a social scientist. But let’s not pretend to do quantum economics.

Even so, the book is convincing in its argument that the Newtonian world (as imported into culture) of straightforward cause and effect has been replaced by a more uncomfortable world of ‘gaps, inconsistencies, warps and bubbles’. The authors think this is a good thing – perhaps it prefigures a ‘new humanism’ they suggest. Hmm. I’m not so sure about that. But I would agree that: “Understanding and appreciating quantum language and imagery – along with the ability to recognise its misuse in fruitloopery – is part of what it means to be an educated person today.” But is there any truly accessible explanation of it for the non-physicist?  51otp0kfvil-_sx331_bo1204203200_