Public Radio on the Country Music Highway

By DON ROLLINS

“The highway won’t hold you tonight/The highway don’t know you’re alive/The highway don’t care if you’re all alone/But I do, I do” — Songwriters Brad Warren, Brett Warren, Josh Kear, Mark Irwin Abramson

I’m winding down eastern Kentucky’s storied sliver of US 23 when a public radio affiliate announces the winners of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics — a stroke of irony that is all the more apparent as the drive unfolds.

Billed as Country Music Highway, and celebrated for the many country stars born or raised at points along “23,” the artery is rich with history and tourist-friendly stops celebrating such headliners as Loretta Lynn, Sturgill Simpson, the Judds and Ricky Skaggs. But while these celebrities have risen above the recalcitrant rural poverty of life along much of 23, the byway itself remains a place of many hardships. And they are not difficult to find.

The NPR piece on the three laureates continues. They are economists Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Michael Kremer (Harvard University), all of whom specialize in global poverty.

The prizewinners’ thesis comes clear as I pass through another highway strand of mostly empty businesses and houses. Banerjee, Duflo and Kremer have for years been immersed in research on alleviating poverty, consistently emphasizing a rare (for Nobel recipients) practical approach.

Described in a public radio, nutshell kind of way, the three researchers found that grassroots field experimentation — combined with careful monitoring and a willingness to (temporarily) fail — yields far better results than traditional, macro-based interventions.

I’m driving through a gap in the still leafy Kentucky mountains as the NPR host summarizes some of the prizewinners’ list of real-world methods for studying poverty: 1. Track access to credit; 2. Study the use of preventative health care and 3. Evaluate access to, and competence with, technology.

By way of example, Kremer found even minor costs for health care dissuades low-income parents from seeking medical assistance for their children: when offered at no cost, 75% of poor parents give their children medication; but when charged even a modest fee, that number drops to 18%. Clearly, financial stability is part of the solution. (Taking Kremer’s research to heart, the World Health Organization now recommends medicines be free to the 800 million students in schools where 20% suffer from parasitic worm infection.)

But the most impactful practice introduced by Banerjee, Duflo and Kremer is akin to the brief therapy model used in counseling: employ field level, focused, experimental interventions that are closely tracked, assessed and adjusted as needed. Then it’s on to the next experiment.

I start to pull into a gas station/convenience store before I realize it’s closed. Circling back to 23 I notice several hypodermic syringes on the surface of a pump island. Another look and I see the sloppy graffiti across the front of the empty store. And the missing doors.

The NPR profile is winding down, but my mind’s already wondering what it would be like if poverty work in the U.S. were done at the field level, and without fear of failure. What would it be like to assign major block grants less pegged to traditional outcomes, and more focused on addressing frontline issues with creativity? And looking out my car window, what difference might this “development economics” approach make in the lives of those along Country Music Highway in layered clothes, pulling their suitcases and dogs while I zoom by?

I’m almost to Tennessee now. Traffic is lighter than anticipated, always a good thing.

Don Rollins is a Unitarian Universalist minister living in Hendersonville, N.C. Email donaldlrollins@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, November 15, 2019

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