Should we dream bigger or smaller?

Do you have a Big Idea, one that you can unfurl on the developing world like a picnic blanket and magically improve health and education? Michael Hobbes writes that the reality is that

we don’t know what works, where, or why. The only way to find out is to test these models—not just before their initial success but afterward, and constantly.

My favorite example of unintended consequences comes, weirdly enough, from the United States. In a speech to a criminology conference, Nancy G. Guerra, the director of the Institute for Global Studies at the University of Delaware, described a project where she held workshops with inner-city Latina teenagers, trying to prevent them from joining gangs. The program worked in that none of the girls committed any violence within six months of the workshops. But by the end of that time, they were all, each and every one, pregnant.

“That behavior was serving a need for them,” she says in her speech. “It made them feel powerful, it made them feel important, it gave them a sense of identity. ... When that ended, [they] needed another kind of meaning in their lives.”

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