Research Highlights Podcast
September 26, 2024
Social organization and redistribution
Jacob Moscona discusses how social structure shapes spillover effects of economic development policies.
Source: ppart
Qualitative accounts of anthropologists indicate that social structure plays an important role in how resources are shared in society. But quantitative evidence measuring the impacts of social organization on financial ties and transfers has been lacking.
In a paper in the American Economic Review, authors Jacob Moscona and Awa Ambra Seck helped to fill that gap. They found that in East Africa, cash transfer policies had very different effects in cultures organized by kinship ties compared to cultures organized around age groups.
The findings suggest that social organization has a deep impact on how resources spread through economies and ultimately shape inequality.
Jacob Moscona recently spoke with Tyler Smith about the difference between kin-based societies and age-based societies and how they affect development policies.
The edited highlights of that conversation are below, and the full interview can be heard using the podcast player.
Tyler Smith: What are age sets, and how are age-based societies organized?
Jacob Moscona: Let me say a word about kin-based societies, because I think that's useful to establish before thinking about how age-based societies differ. What we call kin-based societies in the paper are societies that I think most people are more used to. They are groups where individual family relationships are really important in life, such as your relationships with your parents, your siblings, or your grandparents. When you need support because you've had a bad year, you need a loan, or something else happens, you tend to turn to people in that family or in that extended family. Now that's really different from groups with age sets where the most important social groupings are members of what they call the same age set or age group, which are people of the same age who are often initiated into adulthood at the same time and form really strong bonds together over the course of their lives. In these societies that are organized in this way, it's often the members of your age cohort that you might turn to for support, perhaps instead of members of your own family. By our own estimates, hundreds of millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa alone are members of societies that could be characterized as age-based societies where these age-based groupings are actually the main social group that individuals belong to.
Smith: You are studying these structures in developing countries where there might be some differences. Are there any special considerations for these kin-based societies that you think our listeners should keep in mind?
Moscona: The example of a grandparent helping a grandchild is the kind of relationship that we study directly in this paper. Among these kin-based societies, there are these really strong intergenerational links where different generations are helping each other out. On average, I would say there's probably more of a role in these kin-based groups that we study of the more extended family of people being closer to first cousins and second cousins, and members of the extended family living closer together and those relationships being more a part of everyday life.
Smith: You studied several different policy experiments in Kenya and Uganda. Can you give an overview of the policies you're looking at here and why you chose them?
Moscona: The distinction between kin-based and age-based societies is not common in economics. The idea that these age-based structures really matter isn't something that economists are comfortable with or familiar with. We really wanted to provide concrete and convincing evidence that this mattered. To do that, we turn to the first experiment in the paper, which is a reanalysis of a randomized cash transfer program that took place in northern Kenya that was a component of a larger cash transfer program called the Hunger Safety Net Program. They decided to do a randomized controlled trial for part of this program. What was useful to us is that this randomized controlled trial took place in a region where there were both groups organized around kin and groups where age sets were really prominent. So we could understand the relative importance of these two forms of social structure in the context of the same experiment.
We basically exploited the fact that these cash transfers were randomly given to individuals and we could observe how they spread through the network. We found that in these groups that are age-based, where age sets are really important, we saw really strong evidence that these cash transfers spilled over or affected consumption to members of the age group of the individual who got the transfer, but really had no spillover effects or impacts on members of that individual's family or extended family. It was really strong evidence that age groups are the relevant group in which economic ties are formed. We found the exact opposite pattern for these kin-based groups, where you saw these cash transfers were really shared within the family, but not really within the age cohort.
Smith: Is it right to then think that these age-based ties are just completely substituting for any kin-based transfers, or is it supplementing them?
Moscona: We actually wanted to test that directly, and we do that in two ways. First, in the analysis that I just described, in these age-based groups, you might have seen evidence that these cash transfers are shared within the age group and within the family or extended family. But we actually see no evidence of that transfer being shared within the family or extended family. In addition, part of the cash transfer program wasn't just giving cash transfers to anyone, it was explicitly targeting individuals over 65, which in our sample are disproportionately going to be grandparents. To check the extent to which grandparents invested that money in their grandchildren, we looked at how the arrival of those cash transfers to the grandparent generation affects investment in education, which is predominantly going to affect children. We find that in kin-based societies when the grandparents get more resources or more money in the form of this cash transfer, you see a big increase in investment in education, investment by the grandparent in the grandchild. But those intergenerational investments were entirely absent in age-based societies. It's not as if the grandparents were investing slightly less in the education of their grandchildren. You actually saw no transmission of resources to invest in the grandchild generation. They really seem to be two very different ways of organizing society and as a result, very different ways of thinking about resource sharing and who's helping who out.
I think one lesson for economists is that it's really important to think hard about how social structures matter for the kinds of questions you want to ask and the consequences of any type of intervention or development policy.
Jacob Moscona
Smith: What inequalities were present in these kinship-based and age-based societies?
Moscona: These are just really different ways of spreading and sharing resources in a society. It leads to very different members of society being most vulnerable. In age-based societies, we find that people who are younger and people who are older seem to be systematically worse off. Meaning they're consuming less. Why might that be? Well, in kin-based societies, including maybe in the society in which we live, the young who have fewer resources at their disposal and tend to rely on older members of their family to lend them money, to share resources so that they can do well when they’re starting out in life, You can think of people in our society going to college or their first few jobs after college. They're not making that much money. They're relying on older people to help them out during that part of life. Also, once you're past your main income earning potential, you might rely on people who are younger than you to help you out. But in age-based societies where those intergenerational ties are much weaker, we actually find that the young and the old are worse off.
Now, that's not to say that everybody is better off in kin-based societies. It's just different. The people who are left behind are different. In kin-based societies, we find that on average, there are certain families or clans that are much worse off than others. The inequality in consumption across family groups or across clans is much larger because in these kin-based societies, you can accumulate much more within the kin group. Whereas in these age-based societies, you might have members in your age set who are across different clans spreading out those resources across family groups. Both have inequality, but the pattern and structure of inequality is very different, consistent with the very large differences in social organization.
Smith: Do you think there are any broader lessons for economists to take from this work and the nature of the way we organize our societies?
Moscona: I think one lesson for economists is that it's really important to think hard about how social structures matter for the kinds of questions you want to ask and the consequences of any type of intervention or development policy. Even this distinction between age-based and kin-based societies isn't specific to East Africa. There are age-based groups throughout sub-Saharan Africa, and also age-based organizations in parts of South America and Southeast Asia. There is also an additional range of ways in which social structure is different across groups. The way that families work could be very different across different parts of the world—the relative importance of extended families, the role of secret societies, the role of gender-based groups, the role of school and military groups, the role of religious groups and religious ties, etc. The point is that there is a range of ways that people organize themselves around the world. This is one example, and our results suggest that that's really important to take into account when you want to think about doing economics research and think about designing and implementing economic and development policy.
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“Age Set versus Kin: Culture and Financial Ties in East Africa” appears in the September 2024 issue of the American Economic Review. Music in the audio is by Podington Bear.