Learning the wrong lesson from the right problem

Rwanda is an impressive country. It elected the world’s first female dominated parliament in 2018. Rwanda has reduced it’s maternal mortality rate faster than any other developing country. Since 2008 Rwanda has had a ban on plastic bags with a focus on a paper and cotton. There is 100% countrywide enrollment in primary education. Education overall is free for the 1st 12 years. 350 thousand families have benefited from President Kagame’s one cow per family program which is assisting in building sustainable generational wealth the old African way. Rwanda is becoming a hub for technology with VW’s newest African factory being based in Rwanda. If you want to view a comprehensive list of Rwanda’s accomplishments, please click here.

While Rwanda’s achievements since the terrible genocide of 1994 are very impressive, there is one fact about Rwanda that always stimulates debate. Rwanda is for all intents and purposes a dictatorship. The most direct book published on this topic that I could find is a book titled “Kagame’s Killing Fields”, written by one of Kagame’s former aides David Himbara. Despite the guises of democracy President Kagame is firmly in charge. But luckily for the Rwandan’s he is making all the right economic choices on their behalf at the moment.

A lot has been documented about how it is possible to create spurious correlation between unrelated events. Mainly in the pursuit of assigning causation to that correlation. There is actually a website created by Tyler Vigen that is dedicated to this and makes for some interesting reading. Some examples are that there is apparently a high correlation between comic book sales and computer science doctorates awarded. Or that there is a high correlation between people drowning and ice cream sales. My favourite one of these is that there is a spurious correlation between the number of people who drowned by falling into a pool and the number of films Nicholas Cage appeared in. Stay safe people, keep Cage out of movies!

It is tempting in the case of Rwanda, to zoom in on the fact that they have a dictator as a leader and decide that the way to economic and societal prosperity is to get your own country a dictator. In Africa, we have several case studies that one could look at that immediately disprove this theory. I won’t mention any names. I’m genuinely too scared to. I don’t want to wind up in some remote location with my most sensitive bits attached to a car battery.

The “Dictatorship is Good” theory is a classic example of people taking perfectly good information and somehow coming to a perfectly terrible conclusion. We do this all the time. Sometimes by induction and sometimes by deduction. I have met who people believe that because some races are not represented in certain activities, this means those races are incapable of these activities. Once out fishing with my cousin at the Vaal Dam in Gauteng, we were approached by a middle aged white woman who came to talk to us to inform us that she had never seen black people fishing before and, therefore, wasn’t aware that black people could fish. This is a true story.

I worked with someone once who told me that black people are not good at sales. Indians, yes very good. Whites exceptional. But Blacks, no chance. She had just never hired a black persons in sales before. Her solution, therefore, was to avoid hiring black people, because their absence must have meant they were incapable.

I’ve seen executives losing market share in the market, blame their entire sales loss on the fact that their competitor has a glass bottle and they have a plastic one. Never mind the fact that the competition has put in more effort into building a sustainable brand long term, while their own brand was shamelessly traded to get to annual sales targets.

I’ve seen companies hire top talent from the most successful companies in an industry only for that talent to all walk out within 3 years of arrival. I’ve seen high staff attrition completely attributed to the fact that people wanted to live in another town. We will conveniently ignore the fact that the company is steadily becoming a worse place to work.

Even in entrepreneurship we have seen a few people drop out of college and become technology billionaires. Then society take a key finding that a college degree is irrelevant in the big scheme of things. When billions of other people are worse off in life because they don’t have a college degree. If you believe that you don’t need a college degree because Bill Gates didn’t have a college degree, please read the following article from Business Insider. In some American states the difference between college graduate wages and high school graduate wages is over 98%. In South Africa, it is probably much higher.

It’s almost like there is a huge human flaw that takes any conclusion from a series of facts, and makes it THE conclusion. I really get suspicious when people use sweeping statements. That is usually when my BS filter kicks in. The people who believe that receiving a social grant is an incentive to fall pregnant are part of this stupid set. There is no data to support this, but the conclusion carries around the braai stand. The myth busting site Africa Check did entire research to debunk this myth as early as 2013. Here is the link to that piece of work. My other favourite is people who say “China will overtake the US as the world’s economic superpower in x many years”. To these people I say just google US GDP per capita and China GDP per capita to help temper your answer.

In every human interaction there is the potential to improve, or to learn something. It is just pointless when what we learn from a situation is not helpful or true. We need to find a way to manage our convictions and impulses better. To think through whether the lessons we are learning are real lessons at all. Or just an easy way out, to help us ease the burden of actually having to think through a problem.