The sun was shining upside down

Harold Lloyd in Girl Shy (1924), via Popthomology.

Old David Brooks ("In Praise of Small Miracles") has been doing some heavy reading, in the World Bank's new report on behavioral economics, Mind, Society, and Behavior,  and so have I, but I seem to be getting a totally different message from the thing.  He doesn't actually mention the report till paragraph 7, so as to make it look, as always, as if he knew all this stuff before reading it, and he calls it "amazingly good" as if he were evaluating it against some vast secret knowledge he has of the subject. But, as we'll see, he's missed an awful lot of it, including its central message.

Like, Brooks keeps worrying about

a bias in the way governments often work. They tend to gravitate toward the grand and the abstract....

Behavioral economics policies are beautiful because they are small and concrete but powerful. They remind us that when policies are rooted in actual human behavior and specific day-to-day circumstances, even governments can produce small miracles.

But I keep seeing places where government can go pretty big.

I already knew, for example, that most of us get ripped off by banks. One way they do it is the impenetrable language they use to describe their products. In the World Bank report (p. 16) I learned how, invited to choose among five different $800 loan products, only 39% of low-income Mexico City residents could guess which one offered the best price; given summaries in more straightforward language, 68% could identify the cheapest loan. Governments could incorporate this into the way they regulate consumer lending, as in the plain language rules being developed at the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau pretty much as we speak, but as far as I know David Brooks hasn't spoken out in favor of that yet.

Here's another one: starting in 1998, Brazilian election authorities began a shift from paper ballots to electronic voting (p. 37). Under the old system, Brazilian voters made a lot of mistakes—40% of them had not made it even through 4th grade—and more than 30% of the ballots had to be thrown out. The radical simplification of the voting procedure effectively meant that 11% of the electorate whose vote had never counted before now did, and more pro-poor candidates got elected to state legislatures. This led to states increasing their expenditure on public health 34% over the next eight years; the number of uneducated women who got regular prenatal visits went up 20%; and the number of low birth-weight babies went down 6%. That's a practical result from making it easier to vote, and yet the trend in the US in recent years has been to make voting more difficult. Not sure why David Brooks isn't talking about that.

And then there was the worldwide study that found that poverty is not a stable characteristic (p. 82). Everywhere the investigators looked, ten to fifty percent of the population fell into poverty over a given ten-year period and about ten to fifty percent rose out of it. Poverty is fluid, and what is needed is

an alternative set of assumptions for thinking about decision making in contexts of poverty and for analyzing why poor people may engage in behaviors that ostensibly perpetuate poverty, such as borrowing too much and saving too little, underinvesting in health and education, and ignoring programs and policies designed to assist them. Recent empirical evidence suggests that these decisions do not arise from deviant values or a culture of poverty particular to poor people. To the contrary: both poor people and people who are not poor are affected in the same fundamental way by certain cognitive, psychological, and social constraints on decision making.

And yet some thinkers argue fairly consistently that poverty is a cultural characteristic that government antipoverty programs cannot directly address, and that to eliminate poverty one must change people's culture. One of them, no surprise, is David Brooks.

One thing I can tell you is, he wrote today's column exactly the way I wrote the foregoing: by scrolling through but not reading all that intimidating prose in the World Bank report, sort of making it up to p. 4 and afterwards just focusing on the quirky-looking sidebars and their easy-to-read, colorful charts and tables.

Thus all the cases he mentions in the column are sourced as follows: the lockable box for Kenyan savers, p. 4;  ACT giving four free score reports to colleges instead of just three, fig. 1.5 p. 35, and on the same page the bit about teacher bonuses awarded at beginning of year and taken away at end instead of simply being awarded at the end; and posters in Kenyan minibuses urging passengers to scream at bad drivers fig. 2.6 p. 53;  sugar cane farmers in India making financial decisions after the harvest fig. 4.2 p. 82; and Zambian hairdressers incentivized by gold stars to sell female condoms fig. 7.2 p. 133.

But where I was cherry-picking for the kinds of examples I like, featuring maximal democracy pushing a strong, activist government, he was looking for exotic little cases where rational government tackles irrationality among the masses by targeting some tiny and powerless group, such as cost-conscious college applicants or hairdressers, small government manipulating small people (not always a bad thing).

I'd like to think if he checked out some of the literature (i.e., Wikipedia), he might notice that what he's doing in the column, and indeed everything he writes, is an example of the irrationality by which behavioral economists are troubled:

• Framing: The collection of anecdotes and stereotypes that make up the mental emotional filters individuals rely on to understand and respond to events.

But that is likely asking too much.

Finally, he's just really lazy, and how very little he bothered to look at that report is pretty amazing. If he knew what was in it he wouldn't have linked to it.

Thus he missed the huge stuff on how you respond to better education on climate change depending on what kind of person you are (p. 163, I suppose long after Brooksy gave up):

If you're an "egalitarian communitarian" (i.e., left) it makes you see the risk more clearly, if you're a "hierarchical individualist" (i.e., right) education only makes you deny it harder. (Whereas Brooks likes to pimp destructive moves like the Keystone Pipeline as "modest but good".)

And the value of democracy in averting the destruction of the planet: in a lab experiment (p. 167), allowing participants to vote on whether or not to sustain resources enormously expanded the degree to which the group sustained them, and greatly expanded the number of individuals who were willing to share:

It's the market, and the economists, that are unable to respond to the small quirks and foibles of everyday life; government, especially democratic government, can do it quite well, and the report is resoundingly in favor of government action (text from p. 203):

The standard justifications for government action in market economies are monopolies, externalities, public goods, asymmetric information, redistribution, and macroeconomic stabilization. This Report adds another. Governments should act when inadequate engagement, situational framing, and social practices undermine agency and create or perpetuate poverty. As noted, these efforts should themselves be guided by a healthy respect for individual dignity and welfare—for the freedom of individuals to articulate and implement their own vision of a good life and for a respect for human rights....

In most instances, governments are only one among many players who seek to influence the choices that people make. Moneylenders and banks frame the complexity of the loans they offer. Firms tempt individuals with tasty but unhealthy foods and easy money. Elites of all types enforce informal rules and shape public opinion in ways that benefit themselves as a group. Any number of interested parties exploit people’s tendency to think automatically (Akerlof and Shiller, forthcoming). 

With these other forces at work, government should not play the role of a neutral referee. When it is widely understood that private actors can and should pursue their self-interest, private sector encroachment on agency is to be anticipated. It will be uncommon for the influences on decision making to be evenly balanced. In that context, governments that do not restrain or counterbalance concerted efforts to influence choice, such as deceptive framing and misleading advertising, may be seen not only to permit but even to encourage them. 

Dear me, David, I suspect these people may be liberals.