Too Much Emphasis on Failure

In his blog a few days ago, as I mentioned earlier, Nicholas Kristof printed a letter from a University of North Carolina graduate student about why she was not going to enter Kristof’s contest to go to Africa with him. Kristof wrote too much about failure, she said:

[Quoting Kristof:]“I’m hoping that you’ll be changed when you see a boy dying of malaria because his parents couldn’t afford a $5 mosquito net, or when you talk to a smart girl who is at the top of her class but is forced to drop out of school because she can’t afford a school uniform.” . . . The story of Africa in turmoil is the African narrative that many Americans – and certainly those who read The New York Times – already know. It is virtually the only type of reporting that Western news outlets broadcast about the continent. . . Americans don’t need any more stories of a dying Africa. Instead, we should learn of a living one. Kristof and his winners should investigate how it is that Botswana had the highest per-capita growth of any country in the world for the last 30 years of the twenty-first century.

I believe she is correct. The Times and — I’ll take her word for it — “Western news outlets” in general have made a serious mistake in their Africa coverage: Far too much coverage of failure relative to success. An especially curious misjudgment because generally journalists like feel-good stories.

Could an entire well-respected profession do the wrong thing for a long time? Well, Jane Jacobs thinks so. In a 2000 interview, she said this about economists:

One place where past economic theory has gone wrong in a subtle way is that it has always been called upon for explanations of breakdowns and trouble. Look how foreign aid, even today, is all about poverty and where things are not working. There is no focus on trying to learn how things are working when they work. And if you are going to get a good theory about how things work, you have to focus on how they work, not on how they break down. You can look forever at a broken down wagon or airplane and not learn what it did when it was working.

Maybe you say Jacobs wasn’t a real economist (because she didn’t write mainstream academic papers). Well, consider this. In the 1960s, Saul Sternberg changed the face of experimental psychology when he showed what could be done with reaction-time experiments, which are set up so that the subject almost always gets the right answer. Before Sternberg, memory and perception were usually studied via percent-correct experiments, set up so that subjects were often wrong.

Sternberg’s reaction-time research was so much more revealing than the percent-correct research that preceded it that almost everyone switched to using reaction time. The profession of experimental psychologists had done the wrong thing for a long time.