Theme by nostrich.
Text
Duke University’s Dan Ariely, author of the best-seller “Predictably Irrational,” has made a good living as an iconoclast of the rationality models of classical economics, part of a no-longer-so-new generation of scholars who enjoy pointing out how irrationally people actually seem to behave in life as opposed to on paper. One of his favorite stories concerns an experiment about an Israeli day-care center that began imposing fines on parents who came late to pick up their children. The day-care center hoped the fines would curtail the practice. Instead, the problem got worse. Why? Before the fine, as Ariely explains it, there was a social contract that parents were expected to follow and were ashamed if they failed to do so. Once a price was put on picking up your child late, the problem became a matter of market norms, not social ones. Now, there was no shame in picking up your child late — there was a price for doing so and those who considered it worthwhile to pay the price need not feel embarrassed to make that choice. Ariely and other economists have been essentially debunking the idea that zero is just another price: when something is free, the fundamental laws of behavior surrounding it are different — a kind of equivalent in economics to the speed of light in physics.
In Tanzania, it is interesting to see aspects of the willingness to do things for free set against the backdrop of a powerful and often infuriatingly open and ubiquitous refusal to do anything for free. There is a kind of constant hustle going on here for, as it is often called, a “little something to chew on,” or small fee for any kind of service. There is constant bargaining and asking for money. It is, of course, easy to criticize when one is not nearly so desperately short of cash oneself. And it is the height of hypocrisy for an American to criticize another culture as “money-obsessed.” Outside the sphere of public corruption, hustling is more noble than apathy as a response to poverty. If nothing else, it is noise of the struggle to find the proper price point to make a market economy. But it can also be exhausting, and there is little doubt it is deeply tied to the most fundamental problem everyone talks about here — everything happens so slowly and nothing ever gets DONE. Because often a price isn’t set, and thus the transaction doesn’t happen.
Yesterday, two experiences a few minutes apart highlighted the distinction. The first came at the hospital where Maria has been working heroically to get three different research projects up and running. One in particular has been slowed considerably by the staff’s campaign for “something to chew on” for some fairly minimal cooperation with the project. In a way, their frustration is understandable, but they are on salary and not being asked to work any more hours — the hospital is simply adjusting their work instructions to include minimal cooperation on the research. But of course they don’t see it that way.
A few days after starting the project with no complaint, the nurses went on kind of a work slowdown and made clear they wanted some additional fees for the tasks they were performing. In response to their project-threatening grumpiness, and some sympathy with their frustrations, a system was set up to provide them with some small amounts of compensation.
Meanwhile, one person at the hospital, a receptionist named Happy, was living up to her name and being by far the most cooperative and friendly and helpful for the project, and actually doing the most work. But for complicated reasons she was outside the payment structure. Still, her helpfulness continued unabated. Maria and her research colleague decided it was only fair to somehow include her, and once the new system was in place decided to give her some money as a gift of appreciation.
So yesterday morning we drove into town and walked along the outdoor pathways between the buildings of Mawenzi Hospital, patients lined up outside many of them, to the small building that serves as the psychiatric ward. Maria checked in on the project and pulled Happy aside to explain to her the gift and hand her the money. “But this is such a small amount,” she said, suddenly surprisingly surly and exhibiting an apparently highly irrational economic response to her windfall. Apparently, the world of market norms had exerted herself. Yesterday she was happily helping for free. Today, she is being paid — and unhappy about it.
And yet, the culture of social norms still exists powerfully elsewhere. There is in East Africa a widespread tradition of “umuganda” (contribution). After the unHappy hospital visit, we joined for lunch a woman named Romana Olomi, a kind of jack-of-all-trades local activist who is involved in women’s rights and education and development projects, and on top of that now maintains a full-time job at the regional government hospital. She was talking about one of the poor villages outside Moshi where she works, which had built a school themselves but was struggling to find a teacher. How did they build the school? I asked. Villagers, she explained, give two days of labor per week to collective projects. Village members meet, somehow hash out their various needs and priorities, and allocate their very limited resources and somewhat less limited labor pool. Residents are gathered up to help out — presumably there is some kind of system of fines for slackers, but the social pressure seems to hold it together. One could probably simply see this as a way of paying local taxes, at an effective rate of 2/7ths, with time and sweat instead of money. But it could also be seen as a place where market norms run out.
Don’t worry — I’m not going all Malinowski here and getting into a whole riff about how money and markets ruin everything and if they’d never arrived everything would be perfect here. I think the basic dynamic — a willingness to do some things for free and rampant greed for everything else — is present in some form everywhere. But the forms, and the balance, can be very different, and it’s interesting to watch.
Off to the north side of Mt. Kilimanjaro for some weekend camping now. It will be interesting to see the giant mountain from the other side. Pictures to follow when I return.
