The Unnecessary Nudge: Education and Poverty Policy in a Cairo Slum

Abstract

Drawing on data collected from 2008 to 2013 in a low-income Cairo neighborhood, this article examines the impact of a poverty alleviation program, a conditional cash transfer (CCT) that attempted to incentivize poor mothers, through a direct cash transfer, to send their children to school. The program met its goal. The mothers did send their children to school. I argue that only observing this outcome of school access, however, black-boxes the causal pathway of how mothers sent their children to school in the Egyptian context, and how the program mattered. Public schools in Egypt are free on paper but expensive in practice due to an informal system of "private lesson" and "study group" fees imposed by teachers. Mothers had always managed this expense, using scarce gendered household resources, before, during, and after the program. Through ethnographic, interview, and survey data, this article shows that while the cash-transferred to the mothers and labeled for education-enabled the mothers to send their children to school, the program conditions were unnecessary. The mothers did not need to be nudged to send their children to school. This Egyptian case study has implications for the use of behavioral incentives and for the importance of qualitative methods to the study of policy impacts.

Divided Attention, Divided Self: Race and Dual-mind Theories in the History of Experimental Psychology

“…This history of traits and metaphors of dual-processes of cognition may lead readers to believe that all of this is simply theoretical abstraction, when in fact there are a number of important consequences to all of this. For instance, nudge theory (and to some extent, dual-process theory) has played a significant role in policy at nearly all levels of governance around the world (Whitehead et al 2014), with seemingly more intrusive policies over the poor in certain countries (e.g., Gowayed 2018). This can be seen not just in current theories and applications but also in the ongoing use of certain methods in psychology that have racist associations and origins, such as reaction time measures and IQ testing.…”

Disciplining the Akratic user: Constructing digital (un) wellness

“…The argument for precommitment devices is that our system 1 cognition is more primal, basic, and fundamental to us than system 2, which is often too weak, due to overstimulation and fatigue, to contain our impulsive self. This is why nudge engineers and policymakers say that system 1 nudges are preferred over system 2 nudges due to the limited time and attention of most people (e.g., Thaler & Sunstein, 2008; Whitehead et al, 2017), though it seems poor communities of color tend to be most targeted by nudge policies (e.g., Bertrand et al, 2004; see also Gowayed, 2018) as the poor tend to have a shorter attention span than higher classes (e.g., Banerjee & Mullainathan, 2008), according to many behavioral economists.…”

Abordagens qualitativas em estudos sobre pobreza: uma revisão estruturada da literatura

“…Discussões em grupo e análise temática das falas dos participantes. (Gowayed, 2018) Examinar o impacto de um programa de alívio da pobreza, uma transferência condicionada de renda (CCT) que tentou incentivar mães pobres, através de uma transferência direta de renda, a enviar seus filhos à escola.…”