It was a hot summer evening in 2004 in Rajshahi. I was interviewing a bamboo trader in his mid-fifties as part of a study on the bamboo value chain. My queries were archetypal -- what are his challenges in growing his business, how much does he earn, what can improve his income, why the challenges remain unaddressed.
His shop was next to the highway. Trucks and buses honked. There was a rush among the crowd in the bazaar to get back home. I was all done with my interview and was about to leave. But then, something struck me. I asked, how long have you been trading from this spot? 30 years, he exclaimed. I asked, “why did you never move?” He looked at me with curious eyes. I asked did you ever think of moving or growing your business bigger? He looked at me with curious eyes again and with a little pause said -- no.
This July, I was sitting in a small room in a local government office in Ethiopia. I was listening to a discussion with eight participants from the Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP). Six of them were women and two were men. We were studying their livelihood engagements as part of a study and our findings would inform the Ethiopian government to design the interventions for the sixth phase of PSNP.
One of the male respondents was speaking about engaging in goat and sheep rearing. Together, they call it shoat rearing! I had to wait for cues and translations. I asked, why did he not consider other occupations. He said he does not want to. When asked why, he replied that he did not know those trades. I asked what if you are trained. He was still not comfortable and insisted that he wanted to continue with shoat. I remembered my encounter with the bamboo trader two decades back. And I figured, the biggest bottleneck to growth is the fear of the unknown.
These people have been working on their trade for decades. They know what they can achieve and what they can’t achieve through what they are doing. But they do not know what awaits them if they are to change their vocation. The fear of the unknown locks them in a poorer path, but there is certainty in that path. I figured that we have to remove the fear for people to take a more prosperous path while welcoming the temporary hardship that may come with the change.
These stories are relatable to our own lives. Individually and collectively, we resist change. Our chosen path is the path that we take every day as a routine. We buy the fish from the same trader in the kitchen market even though we accuse him of selling stale fish every time we buy. We go to the same tailor even though we accuse him of destroying the dress. We go to the same restaurant over and over again while we curse them for serving late. Our choices are not based on the bet on what we can gain. Our choices are based on the knowledge of how much we can lose.
The parallel with the Monsoon Revolution
It is thus not surprising that Bangladesh is struggling to change since August 5, 2024. A few months back, in a private meeting, an ambassador asked me, “do your governments change?” I swallowed my response.
Last July and August gave us a once in a lifetime opportunity to turn around. But it was a common understanding that we will not be able to turn around without a hard reset. The chief advisor was ridiculed for his comment on a hard reset. He was not wrong though.
Reflect for a moment. You will not change if I do not change. If you change and I do not, then I gain an advantage over you. Why will you give me an advantage when we are both eying the same opportunity?
Remember, we resist change because we are afraid to lose. I forgot to say another insight that I gained over the years in my quest to find why people resist change. It is our ego. I will not change because you have asked me to. That hurts my ego. I will change only if I want to. That serves my ego. So, the ego and the fear of losing power and control make it almost impossible to impart change.
But this does not mean change does not happen. Bangladesh has progressed amidst all odds. That’s a change that has been made possible due to changes we made in our custom and culture. There was a time when people on the coast would refuse to go to cyclone shelters. They now do. We have brought down casualties from cyclones from thousands to hundreds.
We now have more children born in hospitals than at home. We now have universal immunization. These changes happened over the years because we managed right policies, strong local governance, and partnerships between the government, private sector and the NGOs.
But how do we emulate these wins to bring changes to our fractional and corrosive politics, to our bottomless hunger for power, to our inaction to reform?
As a student of economics and as a practicing economist, I often resort to real life experiments to see how we can influence change. I found the solution in nudges, as stated by Richard Thaler, who won the Nobel prize for his works on nudge theory. Nudge theory is like giving a little push to help people make good choices without telling them exactly what to do.
I follow traffic signals diligently even at the dead of the night when there is no traffic. A car comes from behind and stops next to me. I see the driver utterly confused. He can’t make up his mind whether to go or wait. Most of the time they wait next to me, even though I can sense their restlessness. At times, while stuck in a rickshaw and the traffic barely moves, I just get down and start to walk. Suddenly, I see many others doing the same. I figured that it hurt the ego positively; when everybody disobeys then nobody is seen as the disobedient. But when some obey and some don’t, those that don’t risk their ego.
I believe to influence changes we need to resort to nudges at a mass scale. If you are in London, you might see posters in the London Underground with statements like it takes 20 minutes to walk to a certain location but it might take 40 minutes on the tube given the wait and walk. The British government made good use of nudges to improve tax returns, organ donation, healthy eating, energy conservation.
I believe we need to start with order and discipline. Discipline in traffic management, transportation, discipline in service delivery, discipline in time management. We know the Germans for precision. We cite the Japanese for timeliness. The national passion and pursuit for order and discipline can become addictive.
We are all searching for dopamine. We need to channel our dopamine to the pursuit of order and discipline. And a country that is obsessed with order can barely get it wrong when it comes to making the hard choices but the right choices. So, dear reader, what nudge do you want to experiment to make the change that you strive for?
Md Rubaiyath Sarwar is Managing Director, Innovision Consulting.
