_The Creative Wealth of Nations_

- While income “is a simple, transparent measure of progress toward the goals,” it is not enough to formulate development policies that unequivocally encompass the “full dimensions of well-being—including human capital development, gender equality empowerment, voice and participation, and freedom from violence.”<sup>8</sup>

On the relationship between the arts, social trust, voice and participation, Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel’s conclusion is also worth noting:

- [S]ocieties that rank high on self-expression values also tend to rank high on interpersonal trust. This produces a culture of trust and tolerance, in which people place a relatively high value on individual freedom and self-expression, and have activist political orientations. These are precisely the attributes that the political culture literature defines as crucial to democracy.<sup>9</sup>

That the Bank’s World Development Report 2015 (WDR 2015) is focusing on _Mind, Society, and Behavior_ is a turning point — one leading the quest to understand development in its full dimensions. It is useful to repeat the report’s two main goals here,

- To change the way we think about development problems by integrating knowledge that is now scattered across many disciplines, including behavioral economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, neuroscience, and political science.

- To help development practitioners use the richer understanding of the human actor that emerges from the behavioral sciences in program design, implementation, and evaluation.<sup>10</sup>

Behavioral patterns are intact in our day-to-day interactions. For example, in 2007 the _Washington Post_ performed an experiment on context, perception and priorities that involved world-renowned violinist Joshua Bell playing incognito. The experiment was at the L'Enfant Plaza Metro Station in Washington, D.C. during morning rush hour. For a virtuoso who can command compensation of USD$1000 a minute, playing masterpieces on a Stradivarius violin that cost about USD$ 3.5 million, you would think that Mr. Bell would take the metro station by storm, even during rush hour. But the experiment proved otherwise. More than 1000 people passed by, many of them rushing to work, and the most Mr. Bell could make for his 43-minute performance was USD$32 and some change.<sup>11</sup> Obviously, if the commuters knew about this performance, the results of this experiment would probably have been different.

A more catastrophic example is related to gender-based bias and hurricane deaths: A recent study on hurricanes in the United Sates shows that “feminine-named hurricanes cause significantly more deaths than do masculine-named hurricanes.”<sup>12</sup> This is simply because people are less likely to take feminine-named hurricanes seriously, and hence do not prepare adequately. Such observations underscore the need to scrutinize the power of mindsets and human behavior in

> 8 The World Bank Group. 2014. _The World Bank Group Strategy_ .

> 9 Ronald Inglehart and Chris Welzel, “The WVS Cultural Map of the World,” accessed April 28, 2012, <u>www.worldvaluessurvey.org/wvs/articles/folder_published/article_base_54.</u>

> 10 The World Bank, _World Development Report 2015: Mind, Society, and Behavior_ , accessed April 22,

> 2014,

> http://econ.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTDEC/EXTRESEARCH/EXTWDRS/EXTNWDR2013/0,,con <u>tentMDK:23488439~pagePK:8261309~piPK:8258028~theSitePK:8258025,00.html.</u>

> 11 Gene Weingarten, “Pearls Before Breakfast,” _Washington Post_ , April 8, 2007, accessed June 16, 2014, - <u>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html.</u>

> 12 Kiju Jung, Sharon Shavitt, Madhu Viswanathan, Joseph M. Hilbe, “Female hurricanes are deadlier than male hurricanes”, _Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences_ , accessed June 2, 2014, <u>http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/05/29/1402786111.abstract.</u>

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