Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much (21 page)

The bandwidth tax is an appealing explanation because it accounts for a diverse set of phenomena. Explanations of the poor’s failure are normally piecemeal. Perhaps farmers do not weed for cultural reasons; perhaps diabetics do not take their medications because of side effects; perhaps poor parents just lack the knowledge. These explanations are scattered because the circumstances of the poor are so very different. What people don’t know in Trenton they might know in Nairobi. And what is a norm in Nairobi might not be so in the rural Philippines. In contrast, a single, fundamental mechanism—bandwidth—can make sense of this diverse set of empirical facts across behaviors, time, and place. Surely the specific circumstances also matter for understanding the lives of the poor, but bandwidth is fundamentally important and applies across all of them.

Understanding the role of bandwidth also helps us to better understand the specific circumstances of the poor. Disease, noise, and malnutrition are no longer simply sources of misery but also additional forms of bandwidth taxation. Take the idea that the poor lack certain basic skills. Rather than viewing this as an established fact, we may consider how a bandwidth tax can be one reason for this skill shortfall. Any form of skill acquisition, whether it be learning social skills or developing good spending habits, requires bandwidth. If the poor lack bandwidth, they will be disadvantaged at acquiring useful skills.

All this proposes a new lens through which to understand poverty. We need to look at data that have already been collected—on drug adherence, weeding, parenting, and other behaviors—with a cognitive lens, informed by scarcity considerations. Rather than isolated behaviors, each requiring its own account, these ought to be viewed as predictable consequences of overtaxed bandwidth. This perspective also suggests a new focus for collecting data. When we study poverty, we tend to focus on material conditions,
but we also ought to look at psychological conditions—at bandwidth. In this way, existing puzzles may become less puzzling. To understand the poor, we must recognize that they focus and they tunnel and they make mistakes; that they lack not only money but also bandwidth.

During World War II, the United States military was troubled by
the recurrence of “wheels-up” crashes
: after landing, pilots would retract the wheels instead of the flaps. And, as you can imagine, retracting a plane’s wheels while on the ground is not a good idea. To solve the problem, they brought in an expert. Lieutenant Alphonse Chapanis was a psychologist by training, ideally suited to get inside these pilots’ heads. Why were they so careless? Were they fatigued? Were they relaxing too soon, thinking they could “let go” after a stressful mission? Was it a problem of training?

One clue quickly surfaced: the problem was limited to bomber pilots, those flying B-17s and B-25s. Transport pilots did not make this mistake. This clue helped Chapanis break free of his own biases. He decided not to look inside the pilots’ heads but instead inside their cockpits. In these bombers, the wheel controls and the flap controls were side by side and looked nearly identical. Transport planes, by comparison, had very different controls. What separated the bomber pilots from the transport pilots were the cockpits. One type of cockpit made it too easy to make a mistake.

This
experience transformed how cockpits are designed. Chapanis and others came to realize that many pilot errors were really cockpit errors. Until then, the focus had been on training pilots and ensuring alertness, on producing “excellent pilots” who make few mistakes. But Chapanis’s conclusions changed this. Of course pilots must be trained; of course you must select for the best. But no matter how well you train them or pick them, they will make mistakes, especially if put in confounding contexts.

Error is inevitable, but accidents are not. A good cockpit design should not facilitate mistakes and, more important, should prevent errors from becoming tragedies. Chapanis solved the bombers’ problem by placing a small rubber wheel on the end of the landing gear lever so the pilots could tell which lever they were touching. A good cockpit provides feedback in case one
might
make a mistake. A low-altitude alarm next to the altimeter helps to ensure that a low-flying pilot actually intends to fly low. Planes are much safer today not just because we have built better wings or engines but also because we have gotten better at handling human error.

Chapanis started off stymied by the pilots’ behavior. Many analysts are similarly stymied by the behavior of the poor.
Low-income training programs in the United States
, for example, suffer from absenteeism, dropouts, and a failure by the intended recipients to sign up. Microfinance programs in the developing world bemoan the fact that their clients do not invest enough in high-return activities: instead,
loans are used to pay off other debts
, to fight “fires” (like school fees that have come due), or simply to buy consumer durables. And vaccination programs suffer when people fail to show up to get vaccinated, with the result that debilitating but preventable illnesses still rage through much of the developing world.

We have seen this in our own work. We once served as advisers to
a welfare-to-work program in the United States that sought to help men and women on public assistance find jobs. One of the biggest challenges were the clients themselves. Despite repeatedly being advised to report to the worksite in professional clothes, they would often show up not wearing the right clothing. Many had substandard résumés, badly formatted and with typos. While sometimes this was due to lack of knowledge or skill, much of it was a failure to follow through, to execute as planned. Even after receiving instructions, few would avail themselves of the computers on site to format their résumés or of the offers to procure more appropriate clothing. When interviews were finally scheduled, clients would arrive without résumés and would not bring their “A” game. In many cases they simply failed to show up.

But the designers of these social programs rarely take the perspective that Chapanis took. Rather than look inside the cockpit, they have assumed that the problem lies with the person. They assume the problem is a lack of understanding or of motivation. So they follow up with attempts to educate or to sharpen incentives. In developed countries, this leads to a discussion of a “culture of welfare.” One solution has been to place a lifetime limit on the number of years that a person can receive welfare. This is driven by a simple impulse: to motivate the unemployed to look for work. It has also led to the chastising of aid programs, and it has occasionally motivated public officials to move away from simple transfers—for example, by charging people for clean water rather than giving it to them for free. It has also occasionally led to programs with strong incentives, such as conditional cash transfer programs, where the amount of aid one receives depends on performing assorted “good” behaviors.

But why not look at the design of the cockpit rather than the workings of the pilot? Why not look at the structure of the programs rather than the failings of the clients? If we accept that pilots can fail and that cockpits need to be wisely structured so as to inhibit those failures, why can we not do the same with the poor? Why not design programs structured to be more fault tolerant?

We
could ask the same question of anti-poverty programs. Consider the training programs, where absenteeism is common and dropout rates are high. What happens when, loaded and depleted, a client misses a class? What happens when her mind wanders in class? The next class becomes a lot harder. Miss one or two more classes and dropping out becomes the natural outcome, perhaps even the best option, as she really no longer understands much of what is being discussed in the class. A rigid curriculum—each class building on the previous—is not a forgiving setting for students whose bandwidth is overloaded. Miss a class here and there and our student has started a slide from which she is unlikely to recover. The programs’ design presumes that if people are motivated enough, they will make no mistakes. Those who cannot be bothered to get to class on time, goes the implicit argument, must not care: they do not “deserve” the training.

But the psychology of scarcity predicts that errors like this will be all too common, perhaps even unavoidable, no matter how motivated the person. Imagine you come home from a day at work, worried about where you will find the money to make this month’s rent, cover all the bills, and pay for your daughter’s birthday party. You have not been sleeping well. A few weeks ago, you signed up for a training program in computer skills that one day could help you move up to a better job. But this evening the benefits of such training are abstract and distant. You’re exhausted and weighed down by things more proximal, and you know that even if you go you won’t absorb a thing. Now roll forward a few more weeks. By now you’ve missed another class. And when you go, you understand less than before. Eventually you decide it’s just too much right now; you’ll drop out and sign up another time, when your financial life is more together. The program you tried was not designed to be fault tolerant. It magnified your mistakes, which were predictable, and essentially pushed you out the door.

But it need not be that way. Instead of insisting on no mistakes or for behavior to change, we can redesign the cockpit. Curricula
can be altered, for example, so that there are modules, staggered to start at different times and to proceed in parallel. You missed a class and fell behind? Move to a parallel session running a week or two “behind” this one. Miss a module and you can get back on track on the next round. Sure, it will take you a bit longer to finish, but at least you will get there. As it is, training programs are built with no mistakes in mind, as if the participants are not expected or allowed to stumble. But the poor—even, or perhaps especially, when they are unemployed—have a lot going on. And much of it does not sit so well with being a student. Skipping class in a training program while you’re dealing with scarcity is not the same as playing hooky in middle school. Linear classes that must not be missed can work well for the full-time student; they do not make sense for the juggling poor.

It is important to emphasize that fault tolerance is not a substitute for personal responsibility. On the contrary: fault tolerance is a way to ensure that when the poor do take it on themselves, they can improve—as so many do. Fault tolerance allows the opportunities people receive to match the effort they put in and the circumstances they face. It does not take away the need for hard work; rather, it allows hard work to yield better returns for those who are up for the challenge, just as improved levers in the cockpit allow the dedicated pilot to excel. It is a way to ensure that small slipups—an inevitable consequence of the bandwidth tax—
do not undo hard work
.

Remember the lifetime limits on welfare payments discussed earlier? They were based on a belief that cycling in and out of welfare was due to a lack of motivation on the part of the poor. People went on and off of welfare, it was said, because the system made it too easy not to work. To fix this, in the United States a lifetime cap was imposed for the primary welfare program (now renamed Temporary
Assistance for Needy Families). A person could now only be in the program
for a total of five years over her lifetime
.

A lifetime limit may not be foolish. Limits create scarcity, the logic goes, which might lead to better management of how the resource is “used.” This almost relies on the psychology of scarcity. But it is flawed. We have seen that deadlines work when they are pressing, when they are top of mind. A long-term limit, like a distant deadline, becomes pressing only as it approaches, toward the end. To those who are currently juggling and tunneling, the limit, years away, will reside outside the tunnel, until it is very near. Until the limit becomes a pressing threat, it will be neglected and will rarely cross the person’s mind. And by then it will be too late. This is almost certainly not what was intended by those who devised the plan—years of neglecting the deadline, followed by last-minute panic and eventual failure to receive further aid. In a way, it is the worst of all possible arrangements: it penalizes but fails to motivate.

Limits can be made more effective once we understand tunneling. For a limit to affect behavior it must enter the tunnel. One way would be to send a salient reminder of the months that are remaining. By calling attention to it we can try to force this distant problem into the tunnel. Another way is to change the structure of the limit. We have seen that frequent interim deadlines have a greater impact than a single distant deadline. So a better solution would be to create smaller but more frequent limits. (Perhaps, instead of so many years in a lifetime, only so many months in a given few-year period.) And to make the consequences of going over the limit smaller but immediate, easy to detect and to survive—perhaps a drop in payments rather than cutting off welfare altogether.

There is a general lesson here for how (and how not) to structure incentives. Incentives that fall outside the tunnel are unlikely to work. Imagine you are trying to encourage the vaccination of children whose parents are struggling to make ends meet
this
month. Which is more attractive to them, a payout in a month or two or a payout now? In
one study in rural Rajasthan, India
, a mere kilogram
of lentils proved particularly effective in getting people to come in and get vaccinated. Rewards and penalties in some distant future are less effective for those who tunnel. A hefty subsidy in a savings program that pays out years from now is nice, but it renders those savings an “important but not urgent” matter, one that falls outside the tunnel and can be neglected indefinitely. For an incentive to work, people must see it. And most incentives, unless designed well, risk falling outside the tunnel, rendering them invisible and ineffective.

Conditional cash transfers are an increasingly popular way to transfer money to the poor: the amount of cash a person receives
depends on the good behaviors she exhibits
. Studies show that these programs work; clients respond to the cash incentives. But that’s only one side of the coin. The other side is that many potential clients fail to respond. Here again, the incentives often fall outside the tunnel; the payments come in the future and the desired behaviors are not what is tunneled on now. But this raises another question: Even if we could bring those incentives into the tunnel, should we? Each additional incentive taxes bandwidth. To capitalize on a bonus payment for a child’s medical checkup, a parent must set up the appointment, remember to keep it, find the time to get there and back, and coerce the child to go (no child likes the doctor!). Each of these steps requires some bandwidth. And this is just one behavior. Conditional cash transfer programs seek to encourage dozens, if not hundreds, of these good behaviors. Just understanding those incentives and making the necessary trade-offs—deciding which are worth it for you and which are not, and when—requires bandwidth.

We never ask, Is this how we want poor people to use their bandwidth? We never factor in this cost in deciding which behaviors are most worth promoting. When we design poverty programs, we recognize that the poor are short on cash, so we are careful to conserve
on that. But we do not think of bandwidth as being scarce as well. Nowhere is this clearer than in our impulse to educate. Our first response to many problems is to teach people the skills they lack. Faced with parenting problems, we give parenting skills programs. Faced with financial mistakes—too much borrowing at too-high rates—we provide financial education classes. Faced with employees whose social skills are lacking, we offer “soft skills” classes. We treat education as if it were the least invasive solution, an unadulterated good. But with limited bandwidth, this is just not true. While education is undoubtedly a good thing, we treat it as if it comes with no price tag for the poor. But in fact, bandwidth comes at a high cost: either the person will not focus, and our effort will have been in vain, or he will focus, but then there is a bandwidth tax to pay. When the person actually focuses on the training or the incentives, what is he
not
focusing on? Is that added class really worth what little quality time he managed to spend reading or with his children? There are hidden costs to taxing bandwidth.