A Deeper Look - Issue #19 | Feb 7 2023

Feb 08, 2023

Hi Everyone,

It has been a while since you’ve seen an update so my apologies, its a pleasure to be writing to all of you again. This week’s letter includes:

A Reflection
A Brookings Policy Brief On Access to Education in Pakistan
A Selection of Vancouver Restaurants

Reflection

It has come to my attention that my family has very different styles of decision making. This becomes especially apparent when it comes time to choose a restaurant. The question of “where should we eat?” immediately sparks a flurry of activity. My dad and brother will undertake an extensive research exercise, first a thorough online search, including close read of Google reviews (paying inordinate attention to the negative ones). They will consult the latest Yelp ratings, look over the Zagat guide and weigh up recommendations from friends and family before choosing a place and consulting a menu. This level of research - as my mom and I are keen to remind them, has more often than not resulted in a vastly underwhelming experience prompting perpetual FOMO (fear of missing out) and a conversation of the restaurants we could have, would have, or should have visited.

We live in a world which values the availability of choice and the pursuit of options. It is a society geared towards what Mihir Desai explains is the maximisation of optionality. We make decisions so that we “can keep our options open.” Part of this, of course, is a function of development and progress. We have access to variety, the number of choices has expanded, and our ability to access both those choices and information about them, has exponentially increased.

We see this in the number of cereals available at the grocery store, the number of coffee concoctions available at Starbucks, and the possibility of an endless pool of potential romantic partners in swiping through dating applications. We also strive for optionality in our in career and education planning. Desai comments:

In contrast, the closing of doors and possibilities signals the loss of optionality. This language doesn’t only apply to career planning: Don’t be surprised to hear someone in finance talk about marriage as the death of optionality.
This emphasis on creating optionality can backfire in surprising ways. Instead of enabling young people to take on risks and make choices, acquiring options becomes habitual. You can never create enough option value—and the longer you spend acquiring options, the harder it is to stop.

I would add that in addition to the constant accumulation of options there are two more oversights that this perspective entails, the first is the belief that this plethora of options available to us will continue to exist, and second, that our ability to exercise these options remains unconstrained.

Take the rise of dating applications for example, which brings both an increased pool of potential partners on the one hand, but can also encourage a harmful view of self-worth and relationships. One can swipe through potential partners and dive into an endless pool of possibilities. This may lead to a date or two, or even a permanent connection but there may also be a temptation - that in the illusion of a large sea in which they are many many fish - there arises a feeling that there could be someone better suited, a better missed connection, or that we may have missed a better match.

This overload of options may also encourage a devaluation of the present. The joy and potential of the present is sidelined in anticipation of a brighter future.

A study by Iyengar and Lepper (2000) that tests this “choice overload hypothesis” (that notion that extensive choice while initially desirable can be debilitating) hints at a more nefarious consequence of endless choice. In the puzzle of endless possibility we can loose sight of purpose and the meaning with which we live our lives:

“Perhaps it is not that people are made unhappy by the decisions they make in the face of abundant options but that they are instead unsure--that they are burdened by the responsibility of distinguishing good from bad decisions. Interviews… suggest that modern Americans are uneasy about their current life decisions--that they do not seem to know whether they are doing the right things with their lives, or even what those "right things" are.”

It is this fear that is most dangerous - that we live our life maximising for options and preference. In this view the anchors of life are loosened and the potential for the individual and society to find purpose and meaning becomes more difficult. As the historian Aziz Esmail has explained, modern culture has become fleeting:

“Its treatment of ethics also reflects the incapacity, in much of modern culture to see the moral life as resting on anything more firm, enduring, or objective than the volition - the choices - of individuals. The picture it calls to mind in this respect is of men and women browsing, as it were, in a supermarket of values, there to pick and choose ethical options on the basis of nothing more substantial then the inclinations of their individual personalities.”

There is the danger that we live in a world in which we seek to maximise our options to the extent that we do not know who we truly who we are, what we seek, or wish to become. Our lives are lived in an endless pursuit of options without giving thought to the option we seek to pursue.

Bridging the Gap: Holistic Education Policy to Foster Opportunities for Girls in Rural Pakistan

Brookings has published a policy brief on findings that explore the “disparities between boys and girls in enrolment and continuation of schooling in addition to overall inadequate education outcomes.” The main points include:

Parents value education and believe it can positively impact their children’s lives but these aspirations are not met: The study found that, with some exceptions, parent’s aspirations for their children were viewed through a gendered lens. “In communities where aspirations varied by gender we noted that aspirations for boys more often included jobs, professions, earning a living, and easing hardship for parents. For girls parent’s aspirations more often included their daughters becoming well mannered as well as improvement of the home, community and village… when asked about the number of years their children should study, parents specified lower maximum age for girls compared to boys.”
Parents concerns for safety keep many children out of schools
1. Schools in rural settlement areas are often overcrowded and not structurally safe
2. Schooling outside of settlements increases concerns for safety particularly for young children and older girls.
Perceptions of existing classroom practice discourage enrolment and continuation: The study found that parents complained about “high teacher absenteeism, insufficient time spent on teaching in the classroom, inadequate attention being given to children in overcrowded multi-grade classrooms, differential treatment of children based on caste or kin, corporal punishment and promotion of children to the next grade regardless of their learning.
Poverty creates a formidable set of competing priorities for parents:
1. Competing priorities make it difficult for parents to enroll their children in early years.
2. Parents need support in determining school-readiness for their children to enroll them at the right age: “When we asked parents if they knew the age at which their child should be enrolled in school, their responses ranged from 3 to 7 years.”
The education system both in its absence and presence alienates rural communities: “In rural areas, it is not the mere absence of schools that causes discontent, but incomplete attempts to universalise education that have left behind the debris of dysfunctional or closed schools which are currently strewn across rural Sindh”

Vancouver Restaurants

It would be ill mannered after having discussed restaurants, to leave you without a selection of a few restaurants in Vancouver that are worth trying out if you do find yourself in town. No comment on how we came to these decisions…

Zarak by Afghan Kitchen (Afghan)