Guest Blogger: Jake Samuelson on Shades of Grey

Guest blogger Jake Samuelson is consultant at the Monitor Group, a global strategy consulting firm, and pro-bono consultant for the Robin Hood Foundation. Jake focuses on marketing, media, and technology strategy, helping clients reinvent how they interact with and relate to customers and communities. Jake’s current focus lies in helping high-impact organizations leverage social media for social change.  Jake holds a BA in Economics from Harvard and is a resident of New York City.

Last week, I was lucky enough to be involved in a conversation about where Acumen Fund might be in 20 years. We discussed the potential for Acumen to move into new geographies, including potentially investing in the United States. During this discussion, CEO Jacqueline Novogratz made a comment about how “parts of the developing world would look like the developed world and vice versa” in the future.

This comment sparked my memory, and I recalled the Measure of America project, which disaggregates the Human Development Index calculations for the US by state and Congressional district boundaries.  This is an amazing, interactive resource using detailed data and new technology to increase awareness and, in doing so, drive change. Measure of America’s mission “is to stimulate a fact-based public debate about and political attention to human development issues in the U.S. and to empower people to hold elected officials accountable for progress on issues we all care about: health, education, and income.”

The New York Times Economix bloggers covered the project under the title, “Rich Country Within a Poor One“. If you have time, check out some of the interactive maps; you will see the story we all know, but in a much more granular level and with a slick interface that helps you really make sense of the information. What emerges of course is nuance – the US is a “rich country” where so many are poor, so many don’t have access to health care or a quality education.

A colleague of mine purchased the project’s book and sent out this jarring stat about the sharpest social gradient among congressional districts in the U.S.:  “On average, a resident of the Fourteenth Congressional District (Upper East Side) earns two and a half times as much, lives four years longer, is more than seven times as likely to have a college degree, and is four times less likely to be in poverty than a resident of Sixteenth Congressional District (South Bronx)”

The more data we have, the more clearly we see the there are shades of grey, and the better we can target solutions towards those shades of grey using new tools in the development toolbox and not just our old (and often) blunt instruments.  This resonates clearly in the development debate. When Jeffrey Sachs turn his attention towards Bill Easterly and Dambisa Moyo in the Huffington Post he writes about the shades of grey in traditional aid efforts:

“…most Americans know little about the many crucially successful aid efforts, because Moyo, Easterly, and others lump all kinds of programs - the good and the bad - into one big undifferentiated mass, rather than helping people to understand what is working and how it can be expanded, and what is not working, and should therefore be cut back.”

With more data and new technology, we can tell stories in new ways to help people better understand these shades of grey and better target the world’s biggest problems. This, of course, is the game of Hans Rosling, the TED dynamo and Jacqueline’s fellow speaker at TED@State. Every time Hans gets in front of a crowd, he uses the Trendalyzer to dispel our common myths about the developing world. His famous narrative of course is that the third world is on the same trajectory toward health and prosperity as the West was, and a host of countries are moving a lot faster than the West did. In his latest TED talk on HIV/AIDS he said:

“…So, when we look at the pattern, one thing comes out very clearly: you see the blue bubbles and people say HIV is very high in Africa. I would say, HIV is very different in Africa. You’ll find the highest HIV rate in the world in African countries, and yet you’ll find Senegal, down here, the same rate as United States. And you’ll find Madagascar, and you’ll find a lot of African countries about as low as the rest of the world. It’s this terrible simplification that there’s one Africa and things go on in one way in Africa. We have to stop that. It’s not respectful, and it’s not very clever to think that way.“

Acumen Fund is doing it work to show how and when markets work for the poor, and when they don’t. It is showing when and where patient capital is an alternative to pure markets or philanthropic efforts. It is defining the standards of social performance for patient capital with Pulse. And how can we not forget Wold Metrics day! Acumen is working every day in a smarter way. Hans Rosling closes with this call to action and so will I:

“We hope that when we act on global problems in the future we will not only have the heart, we will not only have the money, but we will also use the brain.”