Models, Not Manuels

“Facing outward on the low bar, the gymnast performs a pike sole circle backward through handstand with flight and a half (180 degree) turn to hang on the high bar.”

That is the description, in the women’s gymnastics code-of-points manual, of an uneven-bars skill called a Van Leeuwen. If you’ve watched Olympic or even college-level women’s gymnastics, you’ve seen it performed. But chances are, if you don’t have direct experience in the sport at fairly high level, you’re having trouble visualizing what the skill looks like from the description alone. It certainly wouldn’t be reasonable to ask you to walk up to a set of uneven bars and perform the skill after merely reading a description of what it is supposed to be.

Arguments about the “success sequence”—the almost-tautological assertion that people who graduate from high school, get and keep a job, and marry before having children are highly unlikely to be poor—often devolve into disputes over whether or to what degree the chronically poor are to blame for their poverty. Is material lack—particularly in America—the result of an unjust society that makes the rich richer and the poor poorer, or is it merely the result of bad decision-making? A simplified version of the first position demands we remake the rules that govern buying, selling, and wealth accumulation, while a simplified version of the second says, “The data shows that if the poor would just make different decisions, they would stop being poor.”

Graduating from high school, getting and keeping a job, and getting married before having children are all very straightforward, common-sense decisions if you have seen them modeled out in your own family and community. But when no one in your intimate circle of relationships has achieved these things, receiving these directives is a little like being asked to perform a Van Leeuwen after merely reading the description in a manual.

Saying, and Living

The de facto theory of change among many policymakers—which is certainly true as far as it goes—is that better information leads to better decisions. Ergo, provide irrefutable information on the success sequence and persuade policymakers of its importance, and they will make better policy decisions. Then, the theory continues, those better policies will in turn create better incentives and communicate better information about the success sequence to the public, who will—because of those policies and that information—make better decisions in their daily lives, adopting the success sequence more often.

This is why the Woodson Center is constantly asked to review and distribute innumerable manuals and curricula covering everything from parenting to financial management, as well as to sign onto countless policies, bills, white papers, and manifestos that purport to offer exactly the right combination of carrots and sticks to end poverty. Any concerns we raise about the extremely limited utility of such tools in the populations we serve is (politely) dismissed with assurances that this manual, book, curricula, or policy is the one that is going to succeed where all others have failed.

Accurate information and policies that create healthier incentives are certainly preferable to inaccurate information and policies that create perverse incentives. But they do not transform human motivation and behavior on the individual or community level any more than reading the description of a Van Leeuwen enables someone with no gymnastics training to perform the skill. And just as high-level gymnastics skills are built on a foundation of strength, flexibility, and basic skills, the success sequence is the culmination of countless foundational strengths and skills that most of us absorbed from our environment rather than read in a manual.

The Woodson Center’s four decades of work in struggling communities have taught us that the way you increase the uptake of the success sequence is not primarily by talking about the success sequence. It is by—among other things—reducing neighborhood crime and violence, building character in the context of moral communities, stimulating neighborhood enterprise, and amplifying indigenous models of the behaviors and decisions that comprise the success sequence. In fact, if you had to choose between disseminating more and better information about the success sequence into struggling communities and providing more and better models of living it out, I am willing to bet that the latter would produce a far greater positive impact.

This is why the Woodson Center has spent so much time and effort to locate and resource the work of neighborhood leaders who show their neighbors what is possible not just by what they say, but by how they live.

What to Want and How to Get It

From birth, we learn by imitating those around us. Whether walking, talking, eating or playing, infants’ and toddlers’ physical, emotional, and cognitive development is propelled by watching and mimicking the behavior of others. Over time, we can also develop the capacity to read and listen to lectures, which is the approach to learning utilized in most formal schooling. But just because we gain the ability to learn from words on a page or from a lecture in a hall doesn’t mean we stop imitating others, consciously or subconsciously.

This component of human nature is well known to leaders who have successfully onboarded people to the success sequence after they missed the first steps. Once one or two people in a struggling community graduate from college or start a successful business, their peers will begin to adjust their ambitions in response. My boss Bob Woodson calls it constructive envy, while Mauricio Miller refers to it as “positive deviance” by “early adopters,” In The Alternative: Most of What You Believe about Poverty is Wrong, Miller notes, “These shared experiences [between neighbors] change expectations and behaviors more effectively than programs…developing new habits or taking new action is easier and spreads more quickly if you see a peer, someone like you, taking on the new behavior or sharing it.”

Most successful gymnasts began training with pull-ups, handstands, splits, rope climbs and other foundational conditioning before they were old enough for kindergarten. Similarly, the foundational skills that make up the success sequence—impulse control, planning for the future, creating and maintaining trusting relationships, and so on—are learned easiest when they are observed and mimicked early in life. Thus, creating on-ramps to the success sequence involves so much more than transferring book knowledge. It ultimately involves transforming desire and inculcating the skills required to satisfy that transformed desire. Unless people both want to get married and possess the skills to get and stay married, for example, marriage rates will continue to fall, even if people know intellectually that this increases their chances of poverty. The same goes for educational achievement, childrearing, and career progression.

Thankfully, unlike high-level gymnastics skills, the character traits that are essential to building a virtuous and productive life can be learned at any age by anyone. But anyone who wants to be part of their successful impartation must recognize the essential role of indigenous models and the personal connections that make those models accessible. Without such living examples, the success sequence is little more than empty rhetoric. Donors who understand this will fund models over manuals.

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This article first appeared in the Giving Review on September 9, 2024.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/models-not-manuels/