Plus ?a change – or how not to re-invent the wheel.

The micro economic models of Bannerjee, Duflo and Kremer may be worthy of a Nobel Prize, but are they new, or have they simply found a formula that has made the world finally listen to what we already know?

My youngest daughter took her first degree in International Development and Sociology at Leeds University and travelled widely to India, Africa and Central America. Although now settled is a primary school teacher in Nottinghamshire, UK, she is no stranger to conditions in what is often (patronisingly) referred to as the third world.

During a family Christmas visit, with her children safely in bed, conversation turned to discovery and learnings from my upcoming Trans-India Challenge. I talked with excitement about the work of Goonj who we are supporting through the challenge, noting how its work is consistent with the 2019 Nobel Prize winning models of Bannerjee, Duflo and Kremer.

At the risk of over-simplifying, Banerjee et al. point to the great potential to relieve poverty through focused micro-interventions; each intervention differing depending on the context of the specific communities being helped. In economic terms they are saying that the goal of GDP growth, and the idea that it will trickle down to eventually alleviate poverty, are misguided. Such approaches have little or no impact on the state of well-being of poor people.

They observed that relatively small inputs can create disproportionate benefits and it is collective well-being that mobilises communities to improve their own condition. A Goonj bridge building project is pictured. Harsh poverty tends to be self-perpetuating and is not relieved sustainably by ‘helicoptering’ in what someone in a smart (first world) office thinks is needed.

Images: Goonj/Anshu Gupta

?A short-lived novelty

These ideas are new for me because my intellectual heritage is as an engineer, analyst and business-person. My daughter let me ramble on until I had got these off my chest. She then stopped me in my tracks with one sentence: “But Dad, we covered all this in my first degree, nearly 20 years ago. This is not new!”

That really got me thinking and rattled around in my brain as the new decade dawned. It put me in mind of two literary contributions. First by Jean Baptiste Karr and the second by Niccolò Machiavelli. In the 1880’s Karr wrote the following: “plus ?a change, plus c'est la même chose” which translated means: “the more it changes, the more it's the same thing”. It is often shortened simply to “plus ?a change”.

Indeed, the problems of ‘developing’ countries’ poverty, exploitation, modern slavery and climate change are not new.

In its current version, the so-called ‘developed world’ has ‘outsourced’ poverty to the so-called ‘developing world’ through the growth of modern manufacturing and world trade. The scale of this change has been one of the biggest economic drivers of the last 70 years as the graph shows.

Source: The World Trade Organisation

Exporting the difficult bits

In my former role as a supply chain advisor to business, I have been part of this exponential growth. The move of manufacturing and supply ‘to the East’ has been driven by lower costs – for example, wages down from $10 per labour hour to $0.50 or less and with associated lower investment costs in land, buildings and equipment.

The labour shaken out of western manufacturing has been re-deployed successfully into service and technology related employment. We have effectively exported lower value work and the associated emissions and social implications to the ‘developing world’ where there has been an ample supply of people to pick up tools and do the work.

The implications of this change only became clear when I read The China Price by Alexandra Harney. This was followed, more by the news in the Harvard Business Review that John Elkington has withdrawn his ‘Triple Bottom Line’ concept on the grounds that it was being misapplied by businesses. He had found they were cherry picking between people, profit and planet to claim corporate social responsibility, leaving the difficult bits on the table. In contrast he intended his original concept to balance all three in an integrated way.

A well-trodden path

The discussion with my daughter made me realise that we have been this way before, through radical change in the means of production. Consider the dash from agriculture to industry during the Industrial Revolution, with its associated appalling working and living conditions. Consider, also, the smogs of the post war years and the ground and water pollution that was commonplace.

Is the current situation really an unforeseen or unforeseeable consequence? Plus ?a change!

The literary contribution comes from Machiavelli’s 16th Century book, The Prince:

“It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than a new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institution and merely lukewarm defenders in those who gain by the new ones.”

Machiavelli’s point is that vested interests will act as a huge brake on change and innovation. He observed this in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Plus ?a change! We are constantly dealing with human nature and self-interests.

The recent failure of COP25 climate conference clearly demonstrates this point, with powerful vested interests (in carbon fuels among other factors) a primary reason for the world’s most influential political players being unable to come agree an integrated programme of action. Meanwhile, the fire is burning around them – literally in the case of Australia!

A burning question

Should this be a question of discussing which hose or extinguisher to use and who should be using it? That is the impression given and Greta Thunberg has rightly branded it a disgrace. Of course, there will be some who stand to lose more than others during any change; but it must surely be better to have a smaller part of something in the future, rather than a bigger part of nothing.

Not only are vested interests a real Machiavellian brake on change, there is a powerful organisational tendency to re-invent the wheel. Given my earlier observations on things that are ‘known’, I am constantly struck in my professional and academic work by the lack of corporate memory which leads to effort being wasted on duplication. I have seen at first hand:

1.            Governments using ‘studies’ to delay and obfuscate on issues while ignoring prior work and thinking

2.            Governments simply not being aware of work that has been done

3.            Academics ‘fitting’ methods to problems rather than finding the right solutions

4.            Academics ignoring prior work where it does not fit their perspectives, circle of references or personal goals

All of this is should be surprising, as the internet is a technology that can deliver almost perfect transparency. The difficulties are the sheer volume of material that exists and just how inaccessible is the language of published papers.

A time to listen

Which brings us back to the Trans-India Challenge and what we hope to explore as we travel. We want to see, hear and be able to relate stories of change and achievement in Goonj villages and locations. We want to see practical actions in operation, delivering real well-being to people. 

The world will change based on stories – it has always been so. The difference is that today we have social media through which to reach the widest audience. Some of what we will see, and report will be decried as ‘Plus ?a change’!

To which our response will be: “Then why is it not universally applied?”

You can follow the Trans-India Challenge on Linked-In, Twitter and Facebook with regular daily updates on the team’s progress and Goonj projects visited.