The Official Site for the Book: In the River They Swim

The burning question in books such as “Dead Aid,” “White Man’s Burden,” and others, focuses on the effectiveness of development aid. The underlying question is why some countries, such as China, India, or even Mauritius and Botswana have seen spikes in GDP growth, while others languish, despite mass infusions of aid? Although the authors propose a variety of well thought-out reasons why aid falls abysmally short of its goals, the discussion of the underlying root causes and prescriptions to address poverty remain largely unsatisfying.

In her chapter, Nature is Destiny from “In The River They Swim,” Sallie Christie discusses the notion of personal contribution as a key component of prosperity at the country level. From her travels, she believes that people she met in Gabon did not believe in personal contribution, while she observed that the late-night, working man in Korea embodied it. She also outlines the seven forms of capital that contribute to a country’s assets, with tangible items such as roads and nature being easy to measure lower forms, and items such as institutions and culture being the more difficult to measure higher forms of capital. In the same book, Elizabeth Hooper mentions in Entire, Unto Himself that there are three levels of culture, with the deepest level being mental models. This is the level that includes Sallie’s notion of personal contribution.

Psychologist Kenneth Craik introduced the term mental model in 1943, and attached the meaning that it is an explanation of someone’s thought process for how something works in the real world. It consists of beliefs, inferences and goals that are first person, concrete and specific. It can be defined, informed and tested around a specific, well-defined objective. Additionally it can be said that mental models are either pro-innovation and create conditions for prosperity, or anti-innovation, and importantly, they can change. Elizabeth would like to answer the question, “can mental models drive prosperity, and suggests that there is more to be done with an anthropologist mindset to find the answer. Another way to pose the question is to determine what obstacles to prosperity exist and how do leaders address those obstacles. Can leaders enable everyone’s personal contribution?

Of all the chapters in the book, “In The River They Swim,” Diego Etcheto’s description of the Afghan marble industry, The Afghan Method, provides the best review of the types of obstacles that exist in developing a prosperous society. Why do fairly wealthy and crafty Afghan business people use dynamite to extract marble, while it fractures the quality, and provides a fraction of the revenue gained by neighbors south of the Afghan border? The answer does not just impact the wealthy investor, but everyone in the village. Near Indian quarries, villages of artisans, machinery builders and a host of marble related businesses have sprouted, and provide above average wages as well as a sense of self-worth for the locals. There is nothing of that sort near the Afghan quarries.

Is the Afghan method due to just bad circumstances and corruption (more than 90% of 200 Afghan leaders in a 2005 study believed corruption was the number one impediment to prosperity), or is it something else? According to Diego, the Afghans were suffering from all seven patterns of uncompetitive behavior as identified by the main author of the book, Michael Fairbanks. This means that Afghans sold mostly raw natural resources, didn’t truly understand customer needs, had a weak knowledge of competitors, did not move towards end users, didn’t cooperate on group initiatives, were not prone to take full responsibility for their position, and looked for government solutions.

Several of these patterns can be considered to be a lack of more intricate business skills, but the last three deal quite a bit with how people in this industry think about the world. Are they self-deterministic or fatalistic? Do they look to others to solve their problems? Do they believe both in competition, and in targeted collaboration as a means to compete in larger arenas?

While working in Afghanistan in 2004, I posed the question to more than 200 Afghan leaders, “can individual companies be competitive in regional and global markets under poor national economic conditions?” One in ten respondents said no. That view likely removes quite a bit of responsibility, and places the locus of action on someone else. As a point of reference, the same question was asked in Rwanda, where two in five said no, and in Serbia, where it was one in two. Further we asked a question concerning the ability to collaborate, focusing on trust among people from different tribes, where less than one in five Afghan leaders felt others could be trusted. Simply stated, when trust is low, the ability to collaborate on key initiatives to compete globally is diminished. Again, as a point of reference, in Serbia, which is a region where the term Balkanized developed, one in three felt that people could be trusted. However, nine in ten Serbian respondents believed that strong companies need to collaborate to succeed, and that collaboration could help lead to prosperity.

Getting back to Diego’s chapter, where local businessmen used dynamite to extract marble from quarries and then shipped the fractured rock to Pakistan, how relevant is it that nine in ten Afghan leaders felt that, “for countries in the developing world, access to natural resources and cheap labor are the most important determinants of their international competitiveness?” The first point we can glean from this data is that mental models may have some impact on how economies are operating. As Elizabeth mentioned, perhaps anthropologists can throw further light on this subject.

The second point is to determine what can be done with these findings. The stakes are very high. The well-known psychologist, B.F. Skinner, believed that a potent form of behavior modification involved using a stimulus to elicit a response. If a reward could be visualized, then it could help alter behavior, and ultimately, help a subject change the way he or she views the impact of their behavior. Essentially, that is changing a mental model. If people can first understand the rewards and the impact of their behavior, perhaps they can change the way they think about their accountability and self-reliance. As shown above, despite the Serbs’ low trust levels, almost all saw the benefit of trust and collaboration at the industry level after glimpsing some future economic reward. Therefore this might not be that far-fetched.

I began this blog with the question of why certain economies languish, despite mass infusions of aid. Diego’s synopsis of Afghan marble certainly explains the real problems at the industry level. But it is by addressing the root causes that we can provide the best solutions. Therefore, we need to get better at asking the right questions, as well as giving the right answers. As Sallie would say, the goal is to have more people think about personal contribution, which leads to accountability and self-reliance. We have asked, “can mental models drive prosperity?” Perhaps another question is, “how can more people believe in themselves?” Elizabeth would like anthropologists to help with the answers to these and related questions. I’d like to see if any psychologists would join in as well.