"The poor often resist the great programs we create for them to solve their problems, because they don't share our confidence in those programs."
(Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo)
Well, as long as we are in the land of economics, the best way of understanding can be in the form of an intellectual experiment. Suppose you are a university student, studying biology and in the future want to specialize in a medical field.While you study, you need to buy a laptop to complete a lot of work.You already have money, so you will buy it. What you do in this case is a successful investment, you pay in your education now to get future benefit when you graduate and work as a doctor, but what if this computer crashes and for some reason while you remember your lessons, suppose you signed a cup of tea on it?
Poverty Trap
Here you will have to fix it for a sum of money.If you don't have money, there are side ways you can fix your computer, like asking for a subsidy from the university, getting money from a friend, paying the repair company in installments or selling something else you own, but in a poor country. In Central Africa, for example, this does not happen, there will always be a reason to prevent your investment in education from moving forward, and you will not find side ways to make up for the shortfall as it has just happened, putting you continuously at the same level without any development in your income. The situation is what we call the poverty trap.
For example, Buthaina is a mother of five, raising chickens to pay school fees, but the money that comes out of chickens is only enough to pay for school, and when any of the children gets sick, chickens get sick, the wall of the house is broken, Any other reason, Buthayna will have to sell chickens and return to the point of need. Buthayna is a model of a citizen of a developing country who cannot get out of the poverty trap for reasons of his own and the state that does not support him health or socially. Something demolishes the paper house he had built.
How then can we help those who are trapped by circumstances to the greatest of their abilities? How can we save 25,000 children who die every day from preventable economic reasons? How can we save 700 million poor people in the world? It is a tragedy that requires us to start raising money now to solve these problems. Now suppose we did that, we raised some $ 200 billion in some way. Do we start giving it to these poor people so that it helps them develop their lives and get out of the poverty trap?
Jeffrey Sachs, professor of economics and one of the most important economic growth experts, in his book "The End of Poverty," that this - in one way or another - is to cure global poverty, to collect together $ 200 billion and give to poor countries in ten years, but William Easterly, professor of economics from New York University, in his book "The White Man's Responsibility," sees the opposite: that aid can boost dependency, empower the nation's interest networks and thus thrive corruption, and aid can impede poor countries from examining their conditions to find solutions to their real problems.
Which is the best way to fight poverty? At that point, some might ask to reflect on the past. Perhaps we could answer this question. If, for example, the average incomes of developing African countries advanced, it would mean that all the assistance provided in the last few decades was useful, Countries did not rise, but they were almost constant, but this does not answer our question. Aid may have already played a role in preventing the deterioration of incomes during the previous decades, raising it to a constant level, or it may have prevented rising incomes and kept them as they are.
Mosquito nets are free
So what is the solution? How can we tackle poverty if we are so blind that we do not know which way is right? At this point, this year's Nobel trio of economists, Esther Duflo, and her husband Abhijit Banerjee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Michael Kramer, a professor of economics at Harvard University, interfere with the unexpectedly, saying: your question is wrong, because it doesn't. We can simply face a very complex problem like this with just one question. We must dismantle it for a series of very small questions and then dive into the world of the poor to answer each one.
In Kenya, malaria kills tens of thousands of children every year. One solution is to give the population mosquito nets equipped to flush the mosquito away from the children's beds. They feel important and continue to use it as a malaria mosquito inhibitor rather than as a fishing net, for example? Here an accurate experiment can be designed to answer this question.
| Mosquito nets for malaria prevention (Getty Images) |
In the experiment, we will provide mosquito nets to the population in several randomly selected villages, in the first group we will provide mosquito nets at a discount of 20%, in another group the discount will be slightly higher 40%, and then continue to progress in the groups until the population gets 100% discount, ie free -Then we will start collecting data and looking at statistics and ask: How many residents got mosquito nets with each discount rate? Will we also ask: Did the nature of the use of the net differ between the possible discount rates? Finally, a third question: Will the Free Mosquito Net refuse to get a free mosquito net after the first one is damaged?
When we examine the results, the population wants to get the mosquito nets the cheaper they go up to the free mosquito nets, and when we compare the nature of the use of the mosquito net to those who paid nothing for those who paid money we will not find a clear difference, which means that those who got it for free did not underestimate it. This means that those who do not use mosquito nets for malaria prevention need education more than money. On the other hand, those who have free mosquito nets will want to pay for additional mosquito nets. This answers the question of whether they are used to mosquito nets. Accustomed to charity.
What happened here is that we have broken up the big question about poverty into several small questions, including one on mosquito nets and malaria, which we have broken down into three small questions, each of which can be answered with purely empirical results, and through the results we can get a specific answer It is best to deal with the problem of bednets and malaria, and the next step is to use those empirical answers - by the executive authorities - to put an end to those problems, at that point we become conscious, not only to answer the question: "Will this method work to remedy that?" Also to answer additional questions as "why you prayed or did not arrive H? ".
It's exactly like the well-known clinical trials, when we want to test a new drug, all we need to do is choose two random groups of people, one we'll test the new drug with it, the second we'll give it fake pills, then we compare the results of the two cases and examine the difference in The improvement between them, if it is clear in favor of the new drug, it has passed the test and we can pass it to use, if it does not work, there must be a problem.
Kg lentils
Another famous example comes from Udaipur, northern India, where only one to six percent of children receive annual vaccinations. We will pay millions of dollars to provide vaccinations for these people, but we discover that the rate remains the same. Do people there neglect their children? In fact, this does not happen because they spend a lot of money on children for treatment after measles, for example, at which point we will look for another reason.
People may do so because of the myths about the annual vaccinations, as well as perhaps because the vaccination centers are so far away that they have to walk several kilometers to reach them and may find their doors closed because the nurse in question has gone to buy some home needs, at which point we can design a package. From experiments to understand why only 6% of the population gets vaccinations, we will conduct vaccination camps in a group of villages that are close to the people, in another group of villages we will motivate people to come and vaccinate their children in exchange for a kilogram of lentils, and in a group Three villages Nothing will do (set to compare).
After a while we will begin to evaluate the results to find an 18% increase in the use of vaccinations in the villages where we set up vaccination camps, the number rises to 39% if we add a kilogram of lentils, which means that people needed nearby centers to go to vaccinate their children, as well as they need Now compare the cost of a kilogram of lentils to the cost of keeping a nurse in the camp for long periods in order to vaccinate all the children and you will find that giving lentils to the villagers is cheaper, here would be a completely unexpected solution, it is a kilogram of lentils to Next to the vaccination!
Do you notice it? We can rule out guesses - which can cost too much time and money - only by building smart and rigorous experiments so that it doesn't matter to answer the big question of Saxe or Easterly, but only to answer very small questions to provide intelligent ideas for immediate action, not only that. We conducted experiments in the same problem environment rather than by simulating, for example, which means that we have obtained the most accurate results at all, but the most important and profound is that, while conducting these experiments, we monitored the behavior of the people with the problem and realized the rules on which to make their own decisions Their.
Are the poor the cause of poverty?
In fact, this is one of the most important results that the trio of economics got this year. Besides developing an entirely new system, the study of poverty economics moves from theoretical speculation to rigorous experimentation. They also have access to the real worlds of the poor. Poor people, when they act irrationally about a problem, they do not do so because it is their nature that impoverished them in the first place, but because poverty is what motivated them to do so, and that is the answer to an old question about the cause of poverty, circumstances or the poor themselves ?!
For example, the poor in some areas are spending the money they just got to buy useless things, such as a smartphone or an expensive meal that could have been replaced by cheap and useful ones, that you might wonder when you give someone a sum of money, which is very poor, To find that he bought a high-priced shirt or a TV or a pack of cigarettes while he could save and divide him for several days, here you will resent what he did, and say that what happened justifies that he is poor at all, it wastes what he has without counting.
But this happens only because you are the son of a different class who sleeps at night and the stomachs of their children are inhabited by a good dinner. For the poor, they cannot easily think of the future as you think. Expect to act rationally on their economic resources, a deeper picture of the poverty trap.
This, of course, does not mean that the poor are not part of the problem. But the problem is that we don't know what caused it all. In the end, the gap between rich and poor classes is growing day by day, and we don't know exactly why, but we know that this is harmful to everyone. The ideas of this year's Nobel trio may help us one day to develop hypotheses. More sedate explores the causes of that real problem.
It was said in the old saying: "Don't give me a fish, but teach me how to fish." But for the poor, it seems more complicated than that. In fact, this year's Nobel Economics is not so much for answers as for questions. After we could come up with quick solutions like "Just give them money, man" or "No, don't give them money," it's imperative that we do a large number of Experiments to answer a large number of small questions, thus transforming the economy of poverty into a kind of medicine in its infancy, and while we thought that we are at the last level of peace to understand and treat poverty, we discover that we are still in the first degree, but at least we are sure that it is a correct first .