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I'm Madam Grant I'm here with Nick Kristoff co-author with his wife Cheryl
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Wun of a path appears a brilliant book that's been called inspiring by the likes of Bill and Melinda Gates Bill
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Clinton Angelina Jolie and many others Nick welcome delighted to be with you well I I've been a fan for a long time
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uh two pullit surprises New York Times column what inspired you to write this book well Cheryl and I had written a
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previous book uh half the sky about empowering women in other countries and then after we wrote that then so many
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people would come up to us and they would ask you know a well what about the US and B so what can I do and we wanted
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to try to address that and it seemed to us that there are so many Americans who want to make a difference in some form
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but the problem seem too vast uh they don't really they're suspicious about
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corruption inefficiency and they don't really know that they can accomplish anything in fact we think there's been a
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pretty good evidence base that has emerged that shows what does work what doesn't work that's one of the big
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points that you Hammer home in the book that we need to take evidence more seriously in this domain why why aren't
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we doing it and how do we change it you know I think that it's so tempting just to go with our gut and
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that's always been the way we've done it I think it's also just a little bit more
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work um but I think it is gradually coming and now you have randomized control trials where you can uh test a
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intervention the way you would a pharmaceutical and um it gives you a real sense of what the impact is at what
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cost and I find it so useful because you know every every Aid group in the history of the world has always found
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that its own interventions are incredibly successful and they always come to me and want me to write about
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them and I you know I'm frankly a little bit skeptical but when I see an outside
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measurement um using randomized trial then I'm much more confident that this
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is real well one of the things that that I found challenging reading the book was
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it led me to question how I actually make my everyday choices and I I have a feeling I'm Not Alone um
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did you find that writing the book transformed your own thinking about giving um you know it challenged me a little
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bit I think Cheryl and me both because you know frankly we do a certain amount of giving that is not particularly
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optimized to create opportunity you know I mean I um we give to some cultural organizations we give to our Alma
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modders uh the beneficiaries of those are going to be you know kids that are better off than average and um and so
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that kind of forc me to think about that and I think where I came down is that it's a little like a a bouet and that we
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don't everything we do isn't intended to you know add a little bit of utility and
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some kind of utilitarian scheme uh but Cheryl and I also go out to dinner and um that money might be better spent in
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Bangladesh but so be it and as long as our donations to a cultural organization or to where Alma moders are coming out
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of the go to dinner money rather than out of the Bangladesh money then we're
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in good shape so there there are a lot of powerful stories along with with studies looking at different ways of of
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trying to successfully make a difference um I thought cure violence was one of the most fascinating ones how did you
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come ac across that story and uh what did you take away from it you know I've
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always been interested in public health approaches because it seems to me that we have this yearning for silver bullets
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and that that is not in fact how change comes about change comes about through silver Buckshot you know just a lot of
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little things that that achieve results and that's kind of a classic public health approach and indeed that is what
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Gary slutkin the founder of cure violence did he was an expert in epidemiology and uh looking at at the
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way contagious diseases spread in Africa and he then came to Chicago and looked at the way gang violence was spreading
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and he realized this is a public health problem it's not a criminological problem and we have tools from public
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health about stopping infections that we can apply to stop gang violence and he began to to do that uh and it worked and
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it worked incredibly cheaply uh and so and he's been able to measure that and
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now try it in other cities it's been it's even being introduced in Syria
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right now um so um you know the this idea of just trying creative new approaches measuring them carefully
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tweaking the model in this sort iterative process to get the most impact you can at the cheapest price I think
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it's just such a powerful model what can companies learn from this approach social impact is a theme that runs
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throughout the the book and what do you think businesses should be doing differently based on everything that
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you've been learning and studying well I've got to say I think businesses right
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now tend to approach um CSO far as this kind of Fringe activity on the side boards and and CEOs spend very little
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time on it it has very little effect I think they've got to completely rethink
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this if they want to recruit and retain young people from the millennial generation for Millennials these are
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issues that really matter deeply and if you're not competing in this space then
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you are undermining the long-term future of your company uh and and that goes to
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the long-term future of your share price as well if you can't get good people um
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I think that companies can have a huge impact on uh Society for good if they exercise it and uh but right now it's
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this kind of peripheral thing it's not well thought out not much measured people know within the company that if
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they go off and CSR you know their career may be stalled I I think we'd all be much better off if companies um made
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this much more front and center you talked not just about you know thinking about social responsibility but about
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creating opportunity how did you settle on that as as your lens and your sort of
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focus within the domain of making a difference CHL and I sort of feel that the basic aphorism for the 21st century
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is that Talent is universal but opportunity is not that just seems to sum up so much of the challenges we face
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and earlier we wrote about women's empowerment because one of the main reasons why um opportunity is not fully
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exercised is gender around the world but it's not the only one and there are an
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awful lot of people who don't exercise their talent can't fulfill their contributions to society because of
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other reasons they don't get a good education they're living in poverty they're stuck in a poverty cycle um and
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uh try to create that opportunity is a way of addressing inequities in society um we tend to measure uh inequality
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through metrics of income or wealth the greatest inequality of all is inequality
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of opportunity and these are things we can do something about and one of the things that that I
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found I would say striking at minimum um maybe even unsettling at maximum is how
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close you got to people who are experiencing this equality inequality of opportunity um you there there are some
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stories in the book that were absolutely gut-wrenching um and what's what's also
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inspiring is that many of them turn around and are able to discover opportunity but but what was it like to
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to engage with people both in the developing world and here in the United States who are just experiencing some of
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the worst of what life has to offer and and still come away with a sense of hope
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you know it is so frustrating when you see um people who we let down because they slip through the cracks there's a
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four-year-old kid in West Virginia who we saw who um had had uh ear infections that weren't addressed early he went
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deaf there was no hearing screening and so as his bra is developing he's not
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getting any auditory stimulus and so he can't speak it's not clear if he's ever
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going to bounce back and I think what I find most frustrating is that there's a
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tendency of successful people to harp on personal responsibility and that's you
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know absolutely true one there's a lot of self-destructive behavior that goes
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with poverty and of course we want personal responsibility on the part of the poor but we also want responsibility
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on the part of society and we let kids get by without a hearing screening or not able to get to a good school or not
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have access to family planning at a time when onethird of teenage girls become pregnant by age 19 then that's
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irresponsibility not just on their part but on all of our parts especially when we have the toolboxes now and the
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evidence about what works and yet we don't implement it what would you like to see happen in in schools let's take
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business school as an as an example if you want to teach the Next Generation to think differently about solving these
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kinds of problems where would you start start Business Schools have so much to offer because one of the problems in the
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nonprofit sector has been you have people with very good intentions who were very very well-meaning but
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productivity in the nonprofit sector has hugely lagged productivity in the for-profit sector and because you're not
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getting Market signals people are much more inclined to invest in nonoptimal uses and over the last 15 or 20 years it
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has really been quite useful to have more people coming from the business world into the doter world with a real
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emphasis on measurement on bang for the buck uh and that is useful but there's a
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lot more that can be done and in particular the nonprofit World often doesn't have people who are good at um
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kind of the um some of the peripheral areas in marketing for example uh nonprofit systematically don't Market
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well and marketing is so much more important if you're encouraging girls education than it is
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if you're you know trying to sell a Coke do you think the same skills apply though or do we need to rethink the way
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that we actually teach people to Market in this new domain I think that in that for that
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example in marketing probably the same skills apply I think that we do need to rethink um a lot of business skills and
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um you know in in finance for example I think that um social impact bonds are potentially a way of providing capital
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for Investments That save the public money in a context in which often government does not invest in things
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that would save it money um and so I think they're I think it's going to be a
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mix uh both applying existing uh business tools to the nonprofit world but also rethinking some um some of the
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conventional business tools for a new context and if you think about your typical business reader coming away from
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the book what actions would you like to see them take that they're not doing
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currently you know one of my frustrations is that we in society generally we have this um sort of
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bifurcation in how we see the world so uh probably a little less true of business audience but in general there
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tends to be this view that um for-profit companies greedy nonprofits Noble um and
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it's obviously more complicated than that what matters is whether there's
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impact and and some businesses for-profit companies can have tremendous impact for good and some nonprofits can
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have none um likewise when we allocate our Capital at the end of the year you know we divert a little bit of it toward
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charity and we want no return we give it all away we want to lose all our investment and then much of it we will
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invest in the market or for our retirement and there we want the highest possible return and you know no
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compromise on that and we don't look at all about social impact there know there
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should be something in between the two maybe uh people are willing to invest their Capital but not get their not get
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a return or to lose part of their capital or you know there should be something in between these two poles
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where do you stand on on B Corps as an example of falling in the middle I think that b Corps are a great idea uh I think
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that uh the whole idea of trying to find Alternatives uh to these two extremes is
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is a really useful one um I think that in practice it's been um you know hard
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to figure out how you manage the tradeoffs uh but uh in general I think it's a great idea and on a similar note
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U buy one give one models are I think exploding in popularity if you think of a tom shoes or Warby Parker how does
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that fit into the picture for you I think that works really well uh as a marketing technique for the companies
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I'm less convinced that it's always always the optimal way of addressing
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that social need you know but on the other hand if if the marketing works and it's a way of getting customers then
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then then it may in the in the long run be successful uh there too there was a a very moving review in
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the New York Times by an Oxford professor of the book uh who warned if you don't want to reink the way that you
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spend your time don't read this book uh and I I think that that was a very accurate way of characterizing the
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effect it has what was your reaction to that review we were incredibly flattered because you
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know we wrote the book not just to inform but ultimately we want people to to then take action and the most
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flattering thing for us has been when a book club reads a path of peers and then
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decides okay what are we going to do now and when they decide to to do something
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and um you know we would love to see uh people who read it then decide okay they're going to not only support um a
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business school With Their donation but also support a nursery school for example you know I think that would
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be I I think that there really is a toolkit out there to have an impact on the world that we are underusing right
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now and I hope that people will pick that up and do things with it what if you were going to take away one major
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message from the book what would be the the driving point there I think one can I get two
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so you know one would be that we really can indeed uh have an impact and that by
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having an impact on others we have an impact on ourselves and that nothing you know that purely altruistic behavior is
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pretty much impossible because of the selfish Pleasures we derive from it and the other is that both in this country
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and abroad one reason why we haven't had more uh luck in chipping away at poverty
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has been that we typically start too late that it is an awful lot easier to help a troubled six uh six-month-old
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than a 16-year-old down the road and you know that's the lwh hanging fruit these
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early interventions and yet we invariably try to pick the high hanging fruit of building prisons later on to
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address those who slipped through the cracks that we put there I think early intervention is a message we can all get
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behind and we're grateful that you came and joined us today thank you I'm
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delighted to be here [Music]