Grit: Probably not that important in developing countries

“Angela Duckworth’s new book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance has been launched with great fanfare, reaching number two on the NY Times Nonfiction bestseller list. She recently gave a very polished and smooth book launch talk to a packed audience at the World Bank, and is working with World Bank colleagues on improving grit in classrooms in Macedonia.”

That’s David McKenzie in a great book review, considering what development economists can learn from this hot psychology research trend. Grit - the ability to keep going when things get tough and you aren’t successful straight away - can help explain all sorts of individual outcomes beyond tests of skill or ability. David notes amongst other things how U.S. - centric the research on grit is, and questions how large the effect of grit is even in this context.

So what do we know about the importance of grit in developing countries?

Fortunately, a separate team at the World Bank has recently been rolling out a series of surveys measuring psychological traits including grit alongside measures of skills, income, and other demographics. Data is currently available for 10 countries; Armenia, Bolivia, Colombia, Georgia, Ghana, Kenya, Laos, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, and Yunnan Province (China).

Here’s what I found from some very quick analysis.

Grit and income

I started by looking at the relationship between adults’ grit and their earnings. For seven countries there is no relationship. For the three where some relationship exists, grit explains very little of the variation between the income of individuals. (That is, in the table below, the r2 statistic is less than 0.005.)  Adding in a few basic control variables (age, parents’ education and socio-economic status) makes even that weak correlation disappear altogether.

Grit and schooling

Moving next to years of schooling, something more substantial emerges. Grit has a statistically significant relationship with schooling in every country, and throwing in a bunch of control variables doesn’t seem to make it go away. I’m not sure what to make of the magnitude though - less than half a year of extra schooling for a 1-standard-deviation increase in grit. Maybe that’s a lot, maybe it isn't. I suppose the policy-relevant question is how responsive grit might be to interventions.

Grit and learning outcomes

Finally, looking at the correlation with answers on a reading comprehension test. Grit scores pretty poorly here too; one positive correlation, one negative, and eight statistically insignificant. Other control variables by comparison do have the kind of statistically significant relationships you might expect - people tend to score better with more schooling and if they grew up in wealthier families.

I’ll spare you some of the snarkier comments from the office, needless to say that unsurprisingly to some, from a quick look the data does not seem to suggest that grit is all that important in explaining important outcomes in developing countries. Unsurprising, because all the grit and resilience and perseverance in the world is unlikely to help a child succeed at school if they haven’t eaten that day and their teacher hasn’t turned up due to a dysfunctional school system. Similarly in the labour market, individual motivation and grit by itself isn’t going to create any well paying jobs in places where the demand for labour is low because of systemic factors such as bad infrastructure and bad governance.

I will offer one caveat - this measure of grit is based on only three questions rather than Duckworth’s preferred ten, so it is possible that a better measure of grit would matter more. But I doubt it.

And finally - this is not meant as a counsel of despair. For individuals living in low-income countries, of course they should try and persevere as hard as they can to try and achieve their goals. But when it comes to making policy - we should focus on the systemic constraints that are critical to shaping people’s opportunities, rather than just telling them to try harder. Bad schools, infrastructure, and governance, are all fixable public policy problems.

Psychology and Economics

There are good reasons for keeping prospect theory out of introductory texts. The basic concepts of economics are essential intellectual tools, which are not easy to grasp even with simplified and unrealistic assumptions about the nature of economic agents who interact in markets. Raising questions about these assumptions even as they are introduced would be confusing, and perhaps demoralizing. It is reasonable to put priority on helping students acquire the basic tools of the discipline. Furthermore the failure of rationality that is built into prospect theory is often irrelevant to the predictions of economic theory, which work out with great precision in some situations and provide good approximations in many others.

-- Daniel Kahneman "Thinking, Fast and Slow"

ICT for Development and the Availability Bias

With apologies to all of the wonderful people who work in ICT4D, but is it possible that actually new technologies aren't all that important, but we focus on them because they are so important to our lives, because it gives us a sense of optimism and hope, and because we like new shiny things? If my amateur psychologising is correct, this is a version of the availability bias.

Essentially the availability heuristic operates on the notion that "if you can think of it, it must be important."

And because we spend all day on our macs and ipads, well surely these things must be able to revolutionise poor countries too right? And not only that, but the idea empowers us to think that we are able to make a difference.

I have a couple of hesitations.

1. One of the chief functions of modern technology is as labour-saving device. Wages are high, so cutting out a worker can really save money. That's why we have to scan our own shopping in the supermarket these days. Well guess what, in most developing countries, wages are not high. That is kinda the definition of developing country. So, the labour-saving device isn't quite so relevant. (I'm thinking of this JPAL project in India. Computer-assisted learning works, but person-assisted learning is more cost-effective).

2. There are already a TON of amazing technologies we already know about that just aren't being used. Fertilizer, vaccines, bednets, chlorine tablets for drinking water. The challenge is getting existing technologies to scale.

I know mobile phones are cool and important. But maybe the really important technologies are the hardest ones. Getting democracy and the rule of law to work. And those are technologies that we really don't know how to transplant to new places.

Anyway, just thinking out loud, let me know why I'm wrong. 

Développement Sans Frontières?

Oliver Burkeman's excellent psychology column in the Guardian discusses some new research on how we think about borders.

Recently, two psychologists working not far from that concrete slab, at the University of Utah, presented people with various scenarios involving where to build a home. Some were told there'd been an earthquake 200 miles away in a neighbouring state; others that there'd been one 200 miles away, but in the same state. They were shown maps, to underline the distances involved - and yet they deemed the risk of earthquakes a bigger problem when they occurred inside state lines. A second test, involving radioactive waste in a next-door state, reached a related conclusion: the risk was seen as smaller when the boundary on the map was drawn in a thicker line. Mental maps guide our lives, but they're quirky;

How does this affect how we think about development, aid, trade, investment, conflict....?