World Bank Research on Behavioral Development Economics

If you have been following along here - and you are a small and priceless group - thank you for that - you would know that I am fascinated by the idea that the economic differences on the planet come, in large part, from how we think about things. I call it our "world view", or how we think things work. The Western, "developed" world has a different framework in their heads than the "developing" world. A sociologist named Hoffstede stumbled on this basic idea, and now a few people have been applying it to assist with development projects around the world.

I wrote a couple of pieces on that here based on my own experience - not formal research by any means. You can find that here:
https://carlscheider.blogspot.com/2014/03/culture-is-key-to-development.html 

I have also been reading in psychology, and in behavioral economics, which, as it turns out, are closely related. There are some posts here on those topics as well.
https://carlscheider.blogspot.com/2016/12/economics-dismal-science-and-how-they.html
https://carlscheider.blogspot.com/2013/03/thinking-fast-and-slow-book-report.html

Economics coupled with the latest psychological insights has developed something called Behavioral Economics. It is based on the latest psychological research which indicates that we are not very rational - hardly. We act spontaneously, without a lot of thought about it, etc. The book Nudge was written by one of the leading proponents of this school, Richard Thaler.  

In Thaler's latest book, Misbehaving, he talks about applying this idea of actual research into what works with normal humans in the world of development economics. It turns out, if you structure a deal one way, many more people will take it up, than if you do it the other way - the "rational" way. Humans are NOT rational. Better to design things for the way we work, but it takes research to figure that out! Of which we have precious little in the real world. The whole Millennium Village thing was theory based - precious little actual trial and error.

Both of those books are fun reads by the way - Thaler writes well and keeps a sense of humour about it all.

I looked about to try to come up some behavioral research for economic development. The genius of this is that sometimes tiny things make a big difference. For instance, in one example from educational research, if you set up a bonus program for good teachers, it works MUCH better to give them the bonus up front, rather than at the end. If the kids do not measure up, then you take the bonus back. You get a much higher achievement by the students simply because humans HATE to let go of something they have, but can easily ignore something they do not have yet. It just FEELS totally different. I was wondering what kind of things exist in the world of development - and the World Bank does too! So they published a study. Amazing.

The book is, "World Development Report 2015: Mind, Society, and Behavior" by the World Bank.

The book is at Amazon, and there is a way to read the introduction and the table of contents. I am interested in reading it, but I have a small pile of books in front of it. And I am just an interested bystander, after all. 

You can read the first part here for free: http://a.co/9EupGcU  

If you want to read the whole introduction, and the table of contents, you will need to get a preview in a Kindle reader. You can get a Kindle reader on almost any device - phone, computer, etc. 

 If you want a Kindle reader on your iPad or computer or phone - here's where to get that.
http://amzn.to/1r0LubW

See what you think, and let me know.

Remember, we are all in this together, and I'm pulling for you.

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For some reason I cannot post comments to my own posts. Gotta look at that.

But I want to tell folks that if you are at all interested in this topic, I discovered that the World Bank spent 2 years pursuing a research project on how modern neuroscience and behavioral economics might impact their efforts to encourage economic and social development around the globe. They published the results of that work in 2015, in a really fine monograph. I HIGHLY recommend it for anyone interested in economic development, global poverty, and the like. 

For a summary of the contents, read this brief “about”:
http://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/wdr2015/about#1   

A free copy of the report in PDF format is here:

http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/645741468339541646/World-development-report-2015-mind-society-and-behavior