"Why we need data on what the poorest think"

"The World Bank recently did a brave and very revealing piece of research. They asked their own staff to what extent they imagined poorer and richer people in three countries would agree with the statement: ‘What happens to me in the future mostly depends on me.’ Bank staff predicted that around 20 per cent of poor people would agree with the statement.

In fact, more than 80 per cent of poor people felt that what happened to them in the future depended on their own efforts – four times as many as the World Bank staff had predicted, and about the same proportion as richer people. It’s worth letting that sink in. Here we have staff in one of the most powerful development agencies in the world, freely assuming that the people whom they are employed to work with, and for, feel passive and helpless when in fact the opposite is the case...

This kind of quantitative research into people’s attitudes is incredibly sparse among development agencies. There is a huge appetite for data on objective things – on health, wealth and education, for example. But data on what people actually think is lagging far behind. It’s very rare indeed for an aid agency or NGO to run a survey to find out about public perceptions, values and views in the countries where they work...

While most individual aid workers do care, very much, about the people they work with and for, the actual structure of the aid business offers few reasons for anyone to worry about what aid recipients think or want. Staff in aid agencies need to think about what their funders want to pay for. For their own performance reviews, they need to think about how to demonstrate that what they are doing is achieving the best possible results with the smallest amount of money. So the incentives for spending money on expensive surveys to find out what representative samples of poor people think of their operations are just not there."

http://aeon.co/magazine/society/why-we-need-data-on-what-the-poorest-think/

I often wonder - who is this for? Like, really for. It feels like a lot of movements in America are filtered through certain dominant cultural desires to avoid guilt and to feel like you are having an impact/"saving the world". I think we focus a lot on quantifiable indicators of big systemic problems instead of thinking about the actual systems, and the indicators we focus on are the ones which are clearly visible to out-group members. And there is also this patronizing thing where it doesn't seem to occur to out-group members that there might be further dynamics happening that aren't immediately visible