International aid looks nothing like it did six months ago. Emergency food assistance sits in abandoned warehouses. Health workers who administered life-saving treatment were there one day, gone the next. People who relied on the United States for food and medicine are weaker and sicker, and some are already dead.
“The fact that the Trump administration thought that the best first target is USAID, because people would back them in that, suggests a failure on our part to make the case for international aid,” Pulitzer-winning journalist Nicholas Kristof said to Dean Karlan, former chief economist of USAID, at this year’s Behavioral Science & Policy Association conference.
The Trump administration began slashing aid funding days after taking office in January of this year, reigniting a long-running debate about the role of the United States in international development. By the end of March, USAID, the primary agency responsible for distributing U.S. foreign aid, had been dismantled. Just 300 of its 10,000 former employees will be rehired for new roles in the State Department. Projects to prevent the spread of malaria and to feed malnourished children were stopped in their tracks. Gavi, an organization that provides vaccines to children in developing countries, estimates that if the U.S. follows through on pulling their funding, 75 million children won’t receive the vaccines they need in the next five years, and over a million will die.
Karlan and Kristof came together at BSPA’s annual conference to discuss these rapid and radical changes to the United States’ approach to international aid. Both believe in the U.S. imperative to use its disproportionate wealth to help the world, but neither knows how that will look going forward.
Both believe in the U.S. imperative to use its disproportionate wealth to help the world, but neither knows how that will look going forward.
They began by discussing the role of behavioral science in international aid. “I’ve come to think that some interventions in the aid space that we traditionally thought benefitted people because of what was tangibly provided may have had their greatest power because of an increase in agency,” said Kristof.
Karlan and his team have found that providing psychosocial support to families in poverty—help with saving, problem-solving, and life planning—can sometimes be just as effective as providing the same support alongside a cash transfer. “With the same budget, [we can] reach more people,” said Karlan.
Behavioral scientists can push a limited aid budget further, but there’s little they can do with no budget at all. Karlan and Kristof also considered how behavioral science might help address the larger failure to rally sufficient public support for foreign aid.
Should we appeal to people’s innate desire to do the right thing? Or to their instinct for self-preservation—if we control avian flu there, it won’t make it here? Should we draw attention to present suffering or to the remarkable strides we’ve already made to reduce it?
“We need to do a better job acknowledging a potential arc of possibility.”
“We need to do a better job acknowledging a potential arc of possibility,” said Kristof. “We focus so much on all that is going wrong, we don’t adequately acknowledge the amazing things that have happened over the last 75 years. There’s been this extraordinary increase in well-being, this stunning decline in poverty, and illiteracy, and child mortality.”
Partway through their conversation, an early-career researcher posed a question to the pair. “As a junior scientist on the [job] market whose research focuses on authoritarianism, misinformation, disinformation, and environmental psychology, I often worry that my career has ended before it could begin. Do you have any advice for early career researchers trying to navigate the workforce during such a hostile time?”
“My advice is maybe selfish in the sense that I’m answering it from the global perspective, not the personal perspective,” Karlan said. “But the world needs that kind of research more now than before, so please stay at it. Is that advice, or is that a plea?”
Watch their full conversation here.
Disclosure: BSPA is an organizational partner of Behavioral Scientist. Organizational partners do not play a role in the editorial decisions of the magazine.
