If you look at the totality of these myriad decisions and trade offs that are made month after month, you start to realize that you are dealing with a budget--only instead of a financial one, it's a balance sheet that accounts for inflows and outflows of mental and physical energy. And according to Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, this budget is the one that really counts. In their new book, 'Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much,' they argue that when thinking about social programs, "We never ask, is this how we want poor people to use their bandwidth?...When we design poverty programs, we recognize that the poor are short on cash...But we do not think of bandwidth as being scarce as well." At first, this sounds absurd: shouldn't the poor be thankful for the free and low-cost programs we offer them? But if you step back for a moment, the answer becomes clear: of course they're thankful for them, but that doesn't mean they fit into their budget!
Consider our Financial Coaching program. Getting people to show up for their first session is really hard, and no-shows are tremendously frustrating for us, especially as we are running a randomized control trial that won't work without a lot of clients completing the study! To solve this problem, we have had to focus in on the barriers our clients face. Are there things we can do, such as providing child care, that will make it easier for families to come to our office? Are house visits an optimal solution? How can we frame the service in such a way that really resonates with the family?
Taking all these factors into account has begun to make a huge difference, not only in how many people sign up for and use the service, but also in how much they get out of it. And once the family starts working with a coach and benefiting from the program, follow up attendance is fantastic. The takeaway here is that before we start throwing services at the poor, we have to deeply understand their circumstances and be empathetic to the unique challenges they face. Just because we put out a flyer that says "Free Financial Coaching!" doesn't mean that a family struggling to put food on the table, pay rent, keep the lights on and stay healthy is going to come bounding into our office.
We teach all of our clients to track their income and their expenses with an eye toward building up their savings and their overall stability. But maybe the greatest benefit of getting a handle on one's finances isn't so much that it will build savings as that it will free up emotional energy to focus on other things. Done right, the greatest impact of our programs may not be what we typically measure--increases in savings and credit score, reductions in debt and use of predatory services--but rather something less tangible. As the authors note, a well-run program can give you "back all that mental bandwidth that you currently use to fret, worry...We'd be taking a cognitive load off [which] would help your executive control, your self-control more broadly, even your parenting." Those impacts start to sound like the kind that truly empower a family to move out of poverty...
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