COMMENTARY
I have been acquainted with Dean Kaplan and his work for a good number of years. I am grateful that he is interested in the problem of poverty ... but at the same time quite disturbed that he and the rest of the academic community with an interest in poverty are getting something dramatically wrong.

While the academics are getting much better at looking at a big range of issues that are associated with poverty, the big issue massive corruption and the dysfunction of the economy are skated over. As long as this huge constraint of prodyctive economic activity esists, all the analysis of initiatives to achieve poverty reduction are going to be marginalized.

My hypothesis is that a beeter approach to socio-economic development perfornmance measurement is needed and is possible. Rather than puiting so much energy in measuring the performance of an activity and an organization, look more at the change in state of a community over time, and associate changes with the economic activities going on in the community. This type of analysis will oftern show that there is substantial valueadd in a community as a result of the work of the people in the community, but also some other activities that takes this valuadd away. This activity can be simply thievery by some elements of society, either in the community or from outside. This is more accounting than statistics ... and the results may not be welcome.

I have done work along this lines on and off for several decades. Some people like the methodology and the conclusions arising ... others do not. My takeaway from this work is that there is a rich and powerful community that takes a lot and gives little back, and the take is huge.

I really want academics to do a rethink of how effective their analytical methods are ... and how much they cost. How much would it cost of be doing the analysis in the manner I have outlines.
Peter Burgess

BOOK: More Than Good Intentions ... Improving the Ways the World's Poor Borrow, Save, Farm, Learn, and Stay Healthy BY DEAN KARLAN AND JACOB APPEL

When it comes to global poverty, people are passionate and polarized. At one extreme: We just need to invest more resources. At the other: We’ve thrown billions down a sinkhole over the last fifty years and accomplished almost nothing.

Dean Karlan and Jacob Appel present an entirely new approach that blazes an optimistic and realistic trail between these two extremes. In this pioneering book Karlan and Appel combine behavioral economics with worldwide field research that take readers with them into villages across Africa, India, South America, and the Philippines, where economic theory collides with real life. They show how small changes in banking, insurance, health care, and other development initiatives that take into account human irrationality can drastically improve the well-being of poor people everywhere.

Savings for Change Project, Mali We in the developed world have found ways to make our own lives profoundly better. We use new tools to spend smarter, save more, eat better, and lead lives more like the ones we imagine. These tools can do the same for the impoverished. Karlan and Appel's research, and those of some close colleagues, show exactly how.

In America alone, individual donors contribute over two hundred billion to charity annually, three times as much as corporations, foundations, and bequests combined. More Than Good Intentions provides a new way to understand what really works to reduce poverty; in so doing, it reveals how to better invest that money and begin transforming the well-being of the world.

EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK

Morning in the harbor at Marina del Rey in Los Angeles is steely bright, and it smells of brine and of fish, and it is filled with the sound of pelicans. They congregate by the hundreds on the end of the jetty, strutting and chattering and throwing their heads back to slug down great bulging beakfuls of breakfast. Completely absorbed in the guzzling of their food, they seem not to notice the dinghies puttering by.

Jake was in one of those dinghies with his girlfriend Chelsea and her father, returning from a short ride out on the gentle rolling swell of the Pacific. They passed the gray-brown pelicans on the gray-brown rocks and continued into the marina. Coming down the causeway, they passed the gas pumps, the big prow of the Catalina ferry, and the Buddhist monks.

Yes, the Buddhist monks: those unassuming men and women, some dressed in saffron robes and others in street clothes, standing on the dock around a folding card table on which was erected a little altar with a statue of a sitting Buddha and an oil lamp. On the ground in front of the table was a plastic tub as big as a steamer trunk. From the boat, low in the water, Jake couldn’t see what was inside. They were saying prayers over it.

Chelsea’s father put the boat into idle and turned in a half-circle to stay even with the monks. They came to the end of their prayer and bowed deeply, and the two closest to the bin took it by the handles and dragged it forward to the edge of the dock. Then they tipped it.

Out came a great torrent of water and minnows, which landed in the causeway with a silvery clatter. The minnows disappeared instantly, darting away in every direction, and the ripples from the splash were drawn down the causeway to the ocean by the outgoing tide. The monks bowed again, deeply, and began to pack up their things.

What Jake had seen, Chelsea told him afterward, was a regular ritual. Those particular Buddhist monks set a tubful of fish free every couple of weeks. It was their small way of setting right something they believed was wrong. They didn’t think those fish ought to be killed, so they bought their freedom. They would approach some fishermen, purchase their day’s catch, say a prayer, and release the fish into the causeway to return to the ocean.

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

DEAN KARLAN is a professor of economics at Yale University. He is also president of Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) and a research fellow of the M.I.T. Jameel Poverty Action Lab. He founded and is president of stickK.com. His research has been funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Ford Foundation, Alfred B. Sloan Foundation, Google.org, National Science Foundation, World Bank, and Interamerican Development Bank, among others. In 2007, Karlan received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

JACOB APPEL studied mathematics at Columbia University and then spent two years as a field researcher with Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) in Ghana, West Africa studying microcredit. From 2008-10, he traveled across Latin America, Africa, and Asia working in the field with IPA and other development research organizations. He recently spent 6 months in Kolkata, India, studying how street market microentrepreneurs make career decisions and manage their businesses. Currently he lives and works in Los Angeles as a Social Impact Strategist with GOOD/Corps.