Our Philosophy
What’s going wrong?
Cost means effectiveness
Many attempted solutions to social problems involve expensive investments or time-consuming legislative interventions that may never be effective. Yet there is an assumption that profound problems require large budgets to solve.
Altruism doesn’t scale
When altruism is stretched into large systems, it often loses effectiveness. Bureaucracy, distance and scale dilute the connections that make altruism powerful.
It works here, so it should work here
Governments and organisations are advised to adopt one-size-fits-all approaches, believing that if something works somewhere else, it can work here. Alternatively, solutions to domestic problems might exist elsewhere but haven’t yet been tried.
People aren’t
bridges
Many people attempt to solve social or political problems as though they were engineering problems. But human nature doesn’t operate according to Newtonian laws.
Thinking too rationally
Most social or political problems are the result of unconscious biases or evolutionary impulses. Attempting to solve these problems through logical solutions overlooks the underlying causes.
Path of least resistance
Unconventional thinking often produces better, cheaper solutions, yet people are disincentivised to try it. If you fail conventionally, you get sympathy; if you fail unconventionally, you get blamed.
What We Do Differently
Take people as they are
Use behavioural norms and biases to generate social changes.
Reverse benchmarking
Instead of discovering what someone else does well and copying it, find out what the other person is ignoring and focus on that.
Less is sometimes more
Smaller, less costly interventions can often achieve greater benefits because they are known to have been produced more cheaply—and, thus, are seen as more organic and less bureaucratic or intervening.
Ignore post-rationalizations
Most people’s beliefs are formed from evolutionary impulses or unconscious biases, and they then post-rationalise logical reasons for holding these beliefs. Focus on tweaking the impulses and biases, rather than the post-rationalisations, to achieve change.
Think national, act local
It is more challenging to implement impactful social change at a national level if people do not see evidence that such changes have been effective and non-threatening at the local level.
Why “Publick Benefit”
In 1714, the Anglo-Dutch writer and physician Bernard Mandeville published his satirical yet deeply influential poem “The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits”. The work scandalized polite society. Its message, however, was disarmingly simple: human beings, through countless generations of social evolution, have learned to turn individual passions and habits into the glue of collective life. At the time, thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes portrayed human nature as a perpetual “war of all against all,” to be restrained only by despotic authority. Mandeville, by contrast, argued that even our less virtuous impulses could produce “publick benefits” if allowed to operate freely. Rather than suppressing human nature, he suggested, societies should understand and channel it to achieve progress. Mandeville’s provocative insight would resonate for centuries, influencing Adam Smith’s notion of the “invisible hand,” David Hume’s and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s moral philosophy, and even Friedrich Hayek’s concept of spontaneous order. In many respects, he can be seen as a forerunner of behavioural economics—and one of the most influential thinkers few have ever heard of.