[Off-Topic] Who's the Idiot?
Reading the book Systems Thinking I came across an interesting story that was the origin of my tweet from yesterday:
Information < Knowledge < Understanding Or What? < How? < Why?
The story goes like this: There was a Ford Foundation birth control project in India. They were frustrated trying to teach family planning and birth control, with no results.
“Indians are irrational.”
That’s what they thought, because:
“They know that the number one enemy is the population, and here we are teaching about control, giving contraceptives, and even a radio as a reward. But look what happens. They go home, turn on the radio, and with music make a new baby.”
Some time later, The New York Times ran a story about a Brazilian woman who had given birth to her 42nd child! And they thought “If that’s not being irrational, then I don’t know what irrational is.”
But thinking about it: “If one woman can have 42 children, then why do Indians, on average, only have 4.6? That means they know how to practice control, but aren’t willing to do it. Maybe we’re trying to solve the wrong problem.”
Later they discovered that at the time there was no social security, no retirement, and no unemployment benefits. So, 3 male children, by default, was considered the retirement system. The first priority of every couple was to prepare for their retirement.
Statistically, having 3 boys requires an average of 4.6 children. Unsurprisingly, those who had reached 3 boys stopped having more. Now, who’s the irrational one? The Indian couple who won a free radio, or the Ford Foundation guy who thought he could get the couple to give up their retirement for a mere little radio?
When we talk about “birth rate problems,” we have the information, or the what: couples with 4.6 children on average increase the general population too much. We also have the knowledge, or the how: birth control programs, contraceptives, lectures, etc. But the crucial point is often the lack of understanding, of the why. Without understanding, we’ll keep applying cookie-cutter recipes that simply don’t work. Understanding the why, we can derive much more effective solutions.
Remember all the talk about root cause analysis, or the five whys — they’re all ways of trying to eliminate the real cause and not the symptoms.