[Off-Topic] Who's the Idiot?

Reading Jamshid Gharajedaghi’s book Systems Thinking, I came across an interesting story that sparked a tweet I posted the day before:

Information < Knowledge < Understanding Or What? < How? < Why?

The story goes like this. There was a Ford Foundation birth control project in India, and the team was frustrated trying to teach family planning and birth control, with no results at all.

“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 having 3 sons was, by default, the retirement system. Every couple’s first priority was to secure their own old age.

Statistically, having 3 sons requires an average of 4.6 children in total. Unsurprisingly, once a couple hit 3 sons, they stopped. Now, who’s the irrational one? The Indian couple who won a free radio, or the Ford Foundation guy who figured they’d give up their own retirement for a dinky little radio?

When we talk about “birth rate problems,” we have the information, or the what: couples averaging 4.6 children push the population up too fast. We also have the knowledge, or the how: birth control programs, contraceptives, lectures. What’s usually missing is the understanding, the why.

Without that understanding, we keep applying cookie-cutter recipes that simply don’t work. Once we understand the why, we can derive far more effective solutions.

Remember all that talk about root cause analysis, or the five whys? They’re all ways of going after the real cause behind the symptoms.