Selection Bias: The Music Video

April 7, 2010

Sorry it’s been so quiet around here. I’ve been engrossed in things that have not made me think new thoughts about microfinance. One is rewriting the 20-month-old chapter 1, which has been a pleasure. I know more now, and am more confident. I am switching more to the first and second person; incorporating lessons from Style: Toward Clarity and Grace (hat tip to Tim Harford) about making sentences cohere; and applying the teachings of Andy Goodman on telling stories (my story, in this case, about how I came to organize the book).

Also, I just guest-taught for Ethan Kapstein, who is on the faculty of the University of Texas in Austin. Here’s a tidbit from the talk, done in Easterly’s interrupted tradition of putting old ideas in fresh comedic togs. I showed this slide illustrating the many things that must go right for microcredit to lift someone out of poverty:

Then I showed this awesome video:

(One amazing thing about this video is that it is a single continuous camera shot.)

The punchline: It took OK Go and its merry band of engineers more than 60 tries to make this machine work—not even counting the runs that flaked out almost immediately. Did you catch the pile of smashed TV’s at 2:43? But OK Go just shows us the one time it all worked.

Get it?

Promoters of microfinance and other causes do the same thing. True believers in our work, we search for the best stories to vivify our theories about how our work makes the world a better place. Even if they’re not representative.

To be fair, I bet it didn’t/wouldn’t have taken 60 more tries to succeed again. Probably the Rube Goldbergians learned as they went. Microfinance institutions learn too.

[On the making of the video.]

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1. Alex K. Says:
   April 7th, 2010 at 5:33 pm

   Interesting (perhaps prescient?) timing on this post David, not sure if you saw that a bunch of practitioners http://tinyurl.com/yaydwl9 led by UNITUS are going to publish a treatise of sorts on measuring impact “their way.” They feel that the recent impact evaluations have damaged the industry’s reputation at the exact moment where it should pick up and lift off….interestingly the op-ed closes with the lines:

   “So how do I answer the question ‘does microfinance actually work?’ Usually it’s pretty simple — I’ll tell the story of Kanti or one of the thousands of mothers like her, and then ask how can we tolerate living in a world where she is never given the chance to work for all that she has gained?”

   This sort of plays into your blog about searching for the best stories, even if they’re not representative. I’m intrigued as to what this treatise will look like and what response it will engender….