Searching for Interdisciplinary Approaches to Poverty

So, I kind of alluded to this last week... it is a theory I have been working on, but I figured I could write my blog post about it, because I see this as a real solution to development aid.

Basically, there is a problem--that I was talking about last week--that poverty creates problems that are interdisciplinary in nature. I noticed this over the course of my studies in both PPE and college in general. The first time I encountered the interdisciplinary nature of poverty was in Ward Elliott's con law class, I was writing a paper about education reforms and Brown v. Board. Basically, there were studies that showed that the problem of the racial gap in educational achievement was best addressed, not by educational reforms, but by reforms more directed towards addressing poverty holistically. For example, it turns out that you can make student test scores go up by providing subsidized housing for poor people. The reasoning behind it is that poor people move a lot more than rich people, and people that move a lot do worse in school than those that move less, so if you provide housing subsidies to stabilize the housing situation of the poor, then their kids do better in school. There are a whole set of these. The most striking was one study--I think I mentioned it in class--that showed that integrating vision clinic services into elementary schools--identifying kids who need glasses and have vision tracking problems--raises reading scores more than California's class size reduction to classes under 20.

Basically, the idea I came away with after this first encounter was that, to address the racial gap in education, you really could not just address education, but had to do something to address aspects of poverty itself.

I did not really understand this at the time though. It was only this summer that I put it all together.

The second time I saw the interdisciplinary nature of poverty was with Sen in Hurley's class. Sen talked about how poverty in and of itself was not the problem. Lower incomes were not a problem; the problem was that people with lower incomes were deprived of certain capabilities that those with freedoms have. Going from this, Sen advocated an approach to international aid that sought to address not just economic growth, but to address freedom (or capabilities). For example, in some place in India, they were able to increase their lifespans and greatly increase healthcare quality, without increasing incomes substantially. The lesson is that if aid is taken holistically, rather than concentrating on increasing income, we can help people more. Income is not what matters, it is the capabilities that come with income. In other words, poverty should not be addressed as an economic problem, but an interdisciplinary one.

Finally, this summer, I figured out how these two depictions were linked through a third source. This source was a doctor named Paul Farmer, who works in the poorest area of Haiti--the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Farmer talked about how diseases were not just biological problems, but biosocial disorders. His patients in Haiti were suffering from malaria, tuberculosis, and AIDs, while his patients at Harvard were not. Did that mean that somehow the people in the two areas were somehow biologically different? No, it meant that poverty is a cofactor of infection of certain diseases, making disease a biosocial disorder. As a result, treating disease should not just provide medication, but also address poverty. This has actually worked for him, by providing small stipends and nutritional supplements and the like, Paul Farmer has gotten cure rates for tuberculosis in the poorest area of Haiti that rival those in the urban United States.

I struggled to synthesize all this learning in my head this summer. I knew that it was all pointing to one thing: poverty needs interdisciplinary solutions. But how can this occur? Sen seemed to imply that it would take people who planned out solutions that incorporated all kinds of factors. After reading Easterly though, I knew that this was not the solution. It was exactly this type of planning that had wasted all our money in the past.

Easterly provides a workable solution to the problem of interdisciplinary approaches to poverty: searching. It is impossible to approach poverty effectively in any interdisciplinary way on a large scale--or at least very difficult. However, when you see an interdisciplinary problem right in front of you, like Paul Farmer does on a daily basis, it is not so hard to make up interdisciplinary solutions. Farmer goes so far as performing small errands to provide things people need. Sometimes his patients ask for nail clippers, or for mangoes to be delivered to a family member in the Unites States, or for a six pack of beer. Paul Farmer has done all these things, because he is a searcher to the max. As a result, he is probably the most successful doctor to ever treat patients in the country of Haiti, because he uses the technique of searching to develop interdisciplinary approaches to poverty.

I think that this is really what we need more of. Although Easterly is a conservative--I think--and I am probably supposed to hate him, I think he is right. He is not right because small, homegrown solutions are inherently better, but because small, homegrown solutions can be interdisciplinary in an effective way. That is what I see as the only path forward to an effective future in foreign aid: interdisciplinary searching.