Category: Information

So there I was, riding the morning train to work, lost in a Ted Talk, as usual. Interesting enough, about diarrhea in India, and how even though rehydration therapy is saving hundreds of thousands of lives, babies are still dying. Then he overlays his slide of a bridge to nowhere with a bunch of words, to make the point that he isn’t talking only about diarrhea, that the problem lies in “the last mile,” getting women actually to use the cheap, available rehydration salts. That sort of problem is common to many areas, and it is nothing to do with poverty, or lack of education. On any given day, 25% of the diabetics in North America are not using their insulin properly. And blow me if, at around 4’40” in, he doesn’t say this:

It’s not just medicine. Here’s another example from technology: agriculture. We think there’s a food problem, so we create new seeds. We think there’s an income problem, so we create new ways of farming that increase income. Well, look at some old ways, some ways that we’d already cracked: intercropping. Intercropping really increases income. Sometimes in rice we found incredible increases in yield when you mix different varieties of rice side by side. Some people are doing that. Many people are not. What’s going on?

Wow! Here’s a guy who gets it. What I found so interesting is that for the rest of his talk Sendhil Mullainathan focused on ways to help individuals to overcome their cognitive and psychological biases and do the right thing, even though at some level they don’t believe it is the right thing. It’s the whole idea of nudging people to change their behaviour. What I found particularly intriguing about the agricultural example is that it isn’t the farmers who need nudging. It’s the people who allocate research funds, and who run (or more likely shut down) extension services, and who deliver what they think poor farmers need or want.

These are the people who need to be nudged. I just wish I knew how. If you’re rich and educated, you can eat the diverse diets that offer better health. But you can also deny that option to poor people. You can invest in a hedge fund, but you can also promote an agricultural system that permits no hedging. What’s going on?

I know there are times when we sound like a cracked record ¹ when we bang on about the disconnect between agriculture and conservation, or the more general lack of awareness of the importance of agrobiodiversity. But this made such a nice change. So, not that you need it, thank you Sendhil Mullainathan.