Imagine you are walking along a wide sidewalk downtown Your City, USA.  In front of you and to the left you spot a table.  People are handing out vitamin supplement samples... for free. Do you take one?

A block later, you encounter another table set up.  It's a different group, but also handing out vitamin supplements for a small fee - say $0.25 for a mini bottle.  Do you buy one?

Now, guess which table was more successful at encouraging people to try vitamin supplements?

A recent Fast Company article citing a similar experiment conducted by J-PAL has created a bit of a stir in the social enterprise blogosphere this last week.  

First, BOPreneur Paul Hudnut wrote a very thoughtful and somewhat provocative post titled, "Is It Right to Have the Poor Pay?"  Shortly after, Francisco Noguera at NextBillion posted this equally interesting response to Hudnut's comments.

The Fast Company article concluded that J-PAL's experiment, which demonstrated that free mosquito nets were more widely adopted than paid-for nets, had proven false the widely-held belief that it's right to have the poor pay small fees for development-related goods and services because doing so encourages a sense of ownership. Really?

Hudnut's post makes the great point that, while it may not always be appropriate to have the poor pay, "charity doesn't scale."   Noguera agrees that "free" sometimes is the best approach, even though market-based approached are generally preferable.  He also remarks on how cross-subsidies can make the latter possible within a social enterprise model.  Both make wonderful points.

But what about the simple fact that "free" is virtually ALWAYS going to be preferable to consumers!  Especially when the alternative is a small fee. I haven't read the J-PAL study cited in the Fast Company article, but if it's as straightforward as it sounds, the outcome should be no surprise to anyone.

The real question is not, "To free or not to free?"  The real question is, Do you measure success by how many mosquito nets you hand out? If so, maybe free is best. But I'd prefer to measure success based on what % of people are using their mosquito nets six months later.  Or perhaps the % of mosquito nets that are still effective (i.e. in good shape) after 12 months.  Or the change in the number of new malaria cases in the community after 3 years. If these are the outcomes you're trying to impact, maybe selling them a mosquito net at a small fee still is the best solution.

Which brings me to my real point here.  Businesses frequently have to create markets and stimulate demand through consumer education and advertising (though internet startups are increasingly doing this through free).  With effort, they get people to value their product enough to pay for it.

Should international development be any different?

I recently wrote two SocialEarth posts - one on short-termism in the private sector and another on starvation in the nonprofit sector - that randomly and beautifully came together the other day in the form of Hernando de Soto's book "The Other Path."

"The Other Path," Perverse Incentives, and Social Devolution

Hernando de Soto is a highly regarded and sometimes controversial Peruvian economist who is given significant credit for the downfall of the Shining Path, Peru's Maoist guerrilla group known for its brutal tactics.  

Written in 1986, De Soto's work highlighted the entrepreneurial qualities and aspirations of Peru's poorer urban classes, as well as the mercantilist policies and laws that were preventing these classes, and Peruvian society overall, from prospering.  He brought to light, for example, the amount of time and money required to legally secure land, build a house, and start a business (often years and amounts of money that equated to many times an average salary).

As indicated by its title, "The Other Path" re-framed the struggle of Peru's poor from one of proletarian suffering and revolution (espoused by the Shining Path) to a fight for markets and policies that were inclusive and universally enabling rather than at the service of the politically-connected.  His message resonated and, importantly, gave Peruvians an alternative war to wage in the battle against poverty and inequality.

The other critical lesson to be gleaned from De Soto's work, and the one pertinent to this post, is the following:

When official laws and policies exclude large groups of people or otherwise fail to be relevant to large sectors of society, these excluded groups are given incentives to create their own norms and institutions, in line with their own needs and values, in competition with the formal framework.

We see this all the time in the world around us - both in developing and developed nations.  In the U.S., people who believe in small government find "creative" ways to avoid taxes. Underage individuals nonetheless consume alcohol. Gays and lesbians find churches who will marry them, despite laws that prohibit or do not recognize same-sex marriage. Across Latin America, poor urban families "invade" public and private lands in efforts to acquire property and housing where these are otherwise very difficult to attain. In Peru, according to De Soto's research, street vendors developed complex associations with other vendors to procure high-traffic locations and then protect their presumptive right to these locales, even when laws did not permit such action.

The common thread tying these examples together is the idea that when laws, institutions, and norms fail to stay relevant, people begin to systematically act in illegal ways, their actions justified by moral philosophies that are different and/or more progressive. In instances where the law and institutions eventually adapt, these episodes of illegality are temporary. Society accepts the moral basis for the formerly illegal action, we adapt our laws, and we go back to behaving legally. This was the case with the civil rights movement in the U.S. and is likely to be the eventual outcome of the battle for same-sex marriage. When laws and institutions fail to adapt effectively, however, and when government does not have the means to control illicit behavior, laws lose their legitimacy, illegality in general becomes increasingly acceptable, and whole generations can start to adopt the notion that ends justify means. In other words, if you believe you have just reason for breaking the law, go ahead and do it.

Illegal actions are, indeed, justified by higher-order rights and moral philosophies in certain cases (the U.S. Declaration of Independence, for example, openly promotes revolution in the face of despotism).  However, the "moral drift" that results when laws and institutions fail to adapt and people are left to behave illegally can have disastrous long-term societal consequences and be incredibly hard to recover from.

Creating Another Path for Our Organizations

Okay, so where does that leave us?  

Well, to bring this down to a very immediate and practical (and perhaps more mundane) level, I believe that, as a result of the unrealistic expectations we place on our organizations, both for- and nonprofit, we create incentives for them to behave badly.

In the case of for-profit organizations, our expectation that companies produce greater returns quarter after quarter drives "short-termism" and creates:

• Disincentives to act in environmentally and socially sustainable ways
• Incentives to engage in unethical, "creative" accounting
• Incentives to make questionable business decisions, such as acquisitions that more-often-than-not destroy value

In the case of nonprofit organizations, our unrealistic expectations regarding overhead create:

• Incentives to engage in unethical, "creative" accounting
• Incentives to not give employees adequate  job training and competitive wages
• Disincentives and an often an inability to invest in the sustainable growth of the organization

In these cases, we are the short-sighted lawmakers and government bureaucrats who have failed to adapt. We have created norms and institutions that have failed to keep up with the needs and best interests of our organizations and our societies. And our failure is both inhibiting the creation of a better world and encouraging our leaders to make unethical, undesirable, or simply questionable decisions that become more and more "normal" every day. Time to stop pointing the finger.

We got ourselves into this mess.  What are we going to do to get ourselves out?  How are we going to create new norms and institutions that recognize reality and pull our societies and organizations away from the ledge?

Many years ago, I was driving through downtown Minneapolis with several younger cousins from Dallas, Texas.  As we pulled up to a major intersection, we noticed a homeless man standing on the side of the road. He looked sad and desperate, wearing filthy clothes and holding a sign soliciting money from the passing vehicles.

As we passed the man, one of my cousins, who was perhaps six or seven years old at the time, leaned out the window and yelled, "Get a job!" Undoubtedly, the United States is a "pick-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps" society.  We honor back-breaking work and private enterprise.  When in trouble, we prefer to look to friends and neighbors, rather than ask the government for handouts and support. We tend to have a love-hate relationship with this fact as a society. On the one hand, we hold dearly these values, which have been lauded by social thinkers like Max Weber and Alexis de Tocqueville as reason for America's rich civil society and strong culture of entrepreneurship.  At the same time, our "bootstrapping" belief system and the associated American Dream often engender selfish behavior and harmful prejudices that none of us should be proud of.  We evade taxes to protect our hard-earned money.  We accept the inadequacy of our social safety net.  And, like my cousin once did, we categorically blame the poor and homeless for their plight. The random confluence of two interesting stories got me thinking about this topic last week, and how it has shaped our attitudes toward development. One story was the outrage over Kiva's decision to begin offering micro-financing to entrepreneurs in the United States.  (More on that here, here, and here.) The second was a report I caught on Minnesota Public Radio on the 27 year old Loaves and Fishes program.  The program was established as a temporary measure to feed the homeless and the poor after the Reagan administration cut back on welfare programs in the early eighties. The Loaves and Fishes story represents how we have traditionally approached development within our own country.  Development is all about job creation and entrepreneurship.  It's about creating policies and institutions that stimulate private investment and create sustainable private sector employment.  The role of aid and charity then (which are also largely private in the U.S.) has been to temporarily prop up those who are transitionally poor or  provide longer-term support to those perfectly incapable of supporting themselves.  It's a "tough love" approach to development that places emphasis on individual motivation, capacity, and dignity. The Kiva story, on the other hand, places the "tough love" approach to development that we have applied within the U.S. in stark contrast to how we've approached development in the rest of the world.  The American international aid establishment and American attitudes toward aid abroad have traditionally revolved around charity first, enterprise second.  I don't know why this is.  It's an utterly mind-boggling contradiction.  But it was readily apparent in the Kiva story, where individuals who were staunch supporters of "interest-free" loans to entrepreneurs in other countries lashed out against the idea of providing the same kind of  "charity" to poorer individuals at home.  It's as though we believe people in the U.S. can and should be able to make it on their own, just like we did, while families abroad need our help and charity to get ahead.  It's American Exceptionalism at it's finest. This double-standard has failed us for too long. Which makes it that much more exciting to see how our attitudes toward development both at home and abroad are evolving.  The role of poverty-focused non-profits in the U.S. can't simply be to plug holes in the social safety net.  We're learning this.  And the emphasis placed on entrepreneurship in international development efforts needs to be significantly greater.  Every day, we're seeing more and more of this. It's an exciting time to be in this field.  I don't know about you, but (in typical American fashion) I'm optimistic for the future.