Driving socioeconomic change by making women more dependent

Yes, I meant to type dependent. Here’s why.

One of the great drivers of mankind’s progress has been our ability to specialize in our knowledge and functions, organize as groups or entities that share knowledge and create amazing things that no individual could do on his or her own. Done well, the outcomes of organizations are far greater than the sum of its parts. The most awesome things that mankind has created – jet planes, space stations, the power grid, they are all borne of interconnected, highly dependent networks of people. Our (Madura’s) women micro-entrepreneurs are the antithesis of this dependence. They are highly unspecialized and operate independently (women, only because that’s who we serve, but this applies to men too). These micro-entrepreneurs strategize, produce, market, manage accounts and do everything on their own. This means that they rarely have the opportunity to benefit from the knowledge of others and rarely have the opportunity to gain deep functional expertise as they are so busy doing a little of everything. That’s a huge limitation on what they are able to achieve. It is remarkable how few of our women borrowers think to band together and create something bigger than any one of them could do alone and I often wonder why this is. Most of the women I have talked to who have grouped in twos or threes have only done so in order to pool their loans to afford an asset, not for aspirational reasons. I’ve been thinking about what drives organization in society and not coming up with a satisfying hypothesis yet. If we could figure this out, it could be very powerful. Ideas folks?

The Physics of Friendship: Do we make friendships no differently than a bunch of particles bouncing around?

Here's an interesting article that I came across that surveyed 90,000 high school students to reconstruct friendship networks and then created a model of the results using knowledge of how particles in physical systems collide and interact. Haven't read the article in depth so I'm not really doing much of a job in terms of useful commentary on its merits. Just pointing it out. (The lead author on the paper though is Marta Gonzales who worked with Albert Laszlo Barabasi who wrote Linked that I posted on earlier).

The Physics of Friendship (This is an easy to read writeup on the actual paper)
By comparing people to mobile particles randomly bouncing off each other, scientists have developed a new model for social networks. The model fits with empirical data to naturally reproduce the community structure, clustering and evolution of general acquaintances and even sexual contacts.

The paper is also an example of how you can use surveys to reconstruct networks and dynamics, relevant to my previous post 'Where does the money go?' and the discussion around it. It would be interesting to see how such social networks in small villages differ from those in large cities particularly with respect to trade (as opposed to friendships). Could be quite telling about how our microentrepreneurs do business since how they bump into each other would be totally different from the way we technology enabled urban folk do.