 It's been an interesting journey for me because I never thought that I would be an economist. Let me see if we can pull this up. I was actually motivated to go into economics by wanting to work in development and realizing that in order to be able to get some of the ideas that we were seeing in the field, particularly some of the things that we're working in Baha'i projects, for example, some we needed to speak the language that would be understood and respected at the kind of tables of decision-making. So that's initially what led me to economics, never thinking that there might be a possibility within the field of economics, not just to learn a language that I could translate some ideas that we might have had from the field or from the writings into, but really a chance to move forward discourse and deepen ideas of the people within the discipline. And I think as I thought about that journey, I thought about what do we sort of traditionally think goes into the process of generating scientific knowledge. So we traditionally think of scientific knowledge as something that is generated by academics, kind of usually in a very stereotypical way, sitting in their Ivy League offices and coming up with some theories. And the idea is that they're supposed to be smart enough and engaged enough to have ideas that then inform and impact policy and practice in the field. And in fact, that people in the field, whether they're people who are actually, sort of for example in this case running NGOs or governments or policy makers, look to academic research to guide their actions. And yet, as we all know, there are tremendous gaps in that process. So in fact, a lot of knowledge is lost and never makes its way into policy or practice. And there's a tremendous amount of frustration in the dialogue between these two of the scientists and the practitioners. On the flip side, there are people who are generating tremendously valuable knowledge from the field. And that knowledge as well never makes its way back into scientific knowledge. So because of this lack of dialogue between these two types of people, I guess, or two areas, there is a tremendous amount of knowledge lost in the process. And so then we have the Universal House of Justice giving us this guidance. That access to knowledge is the right of every human being. And participation in its generation, application and diffusion. A responsibility that all must shoulder in the great enterprise of building a prosperous world civilization. Each individual according to his talents and abilities. Justice demands universal participation. When I first read this, it was like a very big shock to my system. I discussed it with every colleague I could find. Because to me what this said was, you know, we have always thought about academics. We as scientists being the ones that generate the knowledge. And then, you know, practitioners and policymakers and people in the field being the ones who apply it. And if we do a really good job, then we can actually disseminate this knowledge speaking the language properly. But the idea that there would be universal participation in the generation of that knowledge to begin with was quite revolutionary. And I thought about what that would look like in the scope of what we have. So how does this really allow us to not lose all of the knowledge that gets lost in the process. So that we take the academics and the practitioners off of their purchase in their respective places. And we put them together as they start building the scientific knowledge together. Now, that can be a very idealistic proposition. And there's a lot of reasons why that doesn't happen. The first is that academics and people in the field speak very, very different languages. And so, you know, there's the academics who speak academia and the field practitioners who speak what we might call field. And there's some of that knowledge that then gets shared. But a lot that gets lost on the academic side because it's considered overly technical or even not relevant. And on the practitioner side because it's not considered rigorous enough. And this is really a shame because I was remembering when I was an undergrad, I did an internship at the World Bank and I was sitting around a table with a number of people who were making rural development strategy for Morocco. And I was just, you know, an intern so I was kind of just taking notes. But I looked around the whole table and I realized that not one of the people around the room had ever talked to a farmer in Morocco. And the idea that they would be actually engaging with farmers to understand how they're making decisions in the process of creating rural development strategy for those farmers was actually quite anathema. And I remember at that point thinking, I really need to figure out how to translate what's happening in the field into academia. And when I asked my mentors at the World Bank, they said, again, you need to speak this language. You need to go and get a PhD and come back here and be able to speak at the decision-making table. And so all of this shared knowledge that's coming, all this knowledge that got lost from the field, but just because it wasn't considered rigorous enough, there needed to be some translation of it. But then when I actually got to academia, there was this whole other process of thinking about how to make those ideas that come from the field or particularly that come from the Bahá'í writings and come from the way in which we actually interpret what's happening in the field through the lens of the Bahá'í writings and bringing them into the shared basis of scientific knowledge. And that's something that I'd want to say. I'm going to try to give some examples so that it's more concrete. But particularly for the students in the room now, you know, undergrad students, graduate students, PhD students, junior faculty, such a frustrating experience thinking, you know, there are so many gems that we know in the writings and so much that we come to with every discipline. But to try to think about how to make those ideas actually form their way in the discipline and become part of the discourse and the scientific knowledge is one that requires us to actually gain the greatest level of excellence technically in terms of the language that people can understand. And in looking at that, I thought about the role that radicals have played within academia. So how do radical ideas make their way into academic discourse? The sad thing is a lot of radical ideas basically just circumvent the whole scientific knowledge process. So they come from outside and they go right through. Some of it gets shared in practice but often doesn't make its way into academia. So what of economics? Economics is this really interesting discipline that's quite young, maybe only 160 years old compared to other social sciences, but actually came to greatly dominate the social sciences because of its approach of the rational actor, something that is predictable, something that is tractable. And in that process has lost a lot of the richness that economics started with. So who people consider sometimes the founder of modern-day economics, Adam Smith, was actually a moral philosopher. He talked a lot about the moral principles underlying our motivations and our decision-making, but none of those actually made their way into economics. And throughout the history of economics, you can even look at the history of publications. Every 20 years or so there's a sort of spike in the degree in which the discourse and the discipline is speaking about other types of assumptions. So for example, things like humans are not entirely self-interested, they care about other things, or there may be some boundedness to our rationality. And yet then it just goes down. And so what's been very interesting to watch now in the last 20 years is in the history of behavioral economics, there were a number of people who took some of these more radical ideas, created them using extremely technical tools that at first seemed very theoretical and then brought them into the discipline, created a kind of respect for them, and created this entirely new field which is now becoming more and more mainstream called behavioral economics. So as a process of, and I'll talk to you about some of the empirical evidence from behavioral economics in a second, that has allowed this discourse to move significantly forward. But in the process of preparing this presentation for today, I talked with a number of my colleagues who are from outside of behavioral economics just to say, what do you think about this idea of co-generating knowledge together with practitioners? What do you think about this idea of bringing radical ideas into economics and how we can do it well? And they said, you know, this isn't just behavioral economics that explains this. There's also, for example, development economics. So the field of economics that deals with developing countries was often considered something quite marginalized by people within the discipline. It was something that was sort of very soft and not respected and not mainstream until, again, people started to take it seriously, rigorously, do it technically. And then the idea is how do we take those sort of rigorous principles and theories and bring them into the field. So let's take one main assumption within economics, which is that our actions and our decisions reveal our true desires and preferences. So this is what economists call the principle of revealed preference. And this essentially means that you never do anything that you then later regret. And I know that introspection might tell you that that could be potentially wrong. But funny enough, I mean, it was a kind of assumption that made things a lot easier for the discipline to think about. And more or less it could be right. So what's important here is not that there's one instance in which it's wrong, but that it generally gives the right idea, that our actions reflect our true underlying desires. What that also means is that there's no scope for helping people to reach some other part of themselves because there's no conflicted selves. There's just what you do is what you want to do. So then you take significant ideas from all kinds of religion and philosophy. And let's take from Abdul Baha who said it very beautifully. In man there are two natures. His spiritual or higher nature and his material or lower nature. Signs of both of these natures are to be found in men. So now that suggests that in fact there could be times in which our actions and the things we do don't reflect our true preferences. So just by looking at actions that individuals do and their behavior doesn't mean that we understand what they truly want. And in fact there might be some scope for us to make sure that environments that we design, work organizations and products actually speak to people's higher natures rather than their lower natures. Without bringing in this deeper concept of the richness and complexity of human nature being one of a conflicted self that is trying its hardest to be the higher self but in fact has other forces pulling at it without that understanding we would have no actual justification for doing other types of things to help people move in that direction. And that's where economics had been for a long time particularly on things for example that economists would first talk about which is savings. So savings behavior is one of those where you think about the short term self and the immediate gratification of need right now versus a long term sacrifice for the future. So one way to interpret people not saving a lot or not thinking about future investment is to think that they actually just want to do that. That in fact this gives a lot of benefit and pleasure and in economist words utility and therefore there's no need to sort of try to encourage this longer term perspective. But fortunately within economics there had been some really smart scholars who had been considering what happens if individuals can't perfectly foresee what they're trying to do and can't get themselves to do the thing that would be in their best long term interest. And so there were a number of what might be called behavioral models of savings that posited what is called in economics hyperbolic discounting or time inconsistency. What that means is that we have inconsistency in ourselves. It's the exact same thing as the two natures that there is an inconsistency between what we think we want for the long term versus what we do and immediately want for the short term. And these suggest these models suggested that individuals might do things to help themselves get to their long term goals. So they might actually commit themselves to what people call commitment devices. And those are there are many financial instruments that can commit yourself to a long term goal but also from many ancient sources we find evidence as we say anecdotal evidence of commitment devices. So this is from the Odyssey and this is Odysseus saying but you can you must to his to his men. So this is what he was saying Odysseus as the person on the ship. They're about to go to these sirens who he believes are going to be extremely tempting. And what he wanted to make sure was that he would not be tempted by the sirens song to go from his path. He knew where the men needed to go. He knew where the ship needed to go but he knew there would be temptation and he acknowledged that there was a part of him that was vulnerable to that temptation critically. So he asked his men to bind me hard and fast so that I cannot stir from the spot where you will stand me. And if I beg you to release me you must tighten and add to my bonds. So this idea is completely I mean 20 years ago was totally crazy within economics. The idea that you would ask somebody to tighten and add to your bonds to let go of your freedom for a long term goal was something very difficult to accept. And even as these theoretical models made their way and we began to think about the ideas still the question is look we have these nice stories from Odysseus or we have these nice anecdotal examples of people having you know Christmas clubs or savings accounts where they try to bind their hands. And really how important could this actually be. So what we tried to do with some of my colleagues was to bring this into the field and try to actually generate together with a partner organization empirical evidence of one whether people actually have these types of time and consistent preferences. Two whether they demand to be tied to the to the mast in this way. And three whether it actually has an impact on their savings. So with a microfinance bank in the Philippines with the largest one in the Philippines we designed a commitment savings product that was called the seed savings account. And it was essentially a locked box which many of you might have had as children. And here actually was part of the culture called the nuncha boxes and a contract with the bank that said please do not let me take out this money that I have put in until a certain date or amount has been reached. If I ask you to take it out before this data amount has been reached please don't let me. That's what the contract said. For standard neoclassical economic theory no one should want this account because it had the exact same interest rate as a regular savings account. So on a regular savings account you have entire freedom to take out the money whenever you like. So you have full liquidity and that should be much more beneficial to you than having the bank hold up your money. And yet a number of people wanted this in fact 30 percent of people wanted this account. Those were exactly the people who actually we had in survey measures measured to have these timing consistent preferences. And turns out that for those people it was tremendously effective in helping them to increase savings. So after 12 months on average people increased their savings by 80 percent. For those people who took up the account they increased their savings by 300 percent. So these numbers were large enough within economics for people to take seriously and to say OK this is actually a serious phenomenon it's pretty important. And so it started to have a discourse within economics about commitment devices in general. Not only then within for savings but also for smoking and for fertilizer use for farmers and for a number of other papers that have been done since. Really taking into account how saving commitment devices in all ways can be used to help individuals. It's also had an impact in the field. So this is something that you can do if you ever have a challenge with your higher and lower self and you would like to commit yourself. You can get on stick dot com and this this website came directly out of this paper. And you can sign up to commit to a particular goal and and put up money that is sent to an anti charity if you don't make your goal. Or you can ask people to be your referees and to help keep you to that goal. So that's the way in which practice and academia sort of came together in this. I'm going to take you through one other study that talks about another sort of main assumption within economics. Which is the one that you hear maybe first when you go into say take an econ one on one class that human beings are driven by self interest. This is a very standard thing within economics. And yet we kind of have a sense that actually we do care about others. All of us do to some degree. The question is how important is that. And how can we actually put that assumption to the test. Telling an economist but we care about others doesn't really help when this is a fundamental assumption in the field. And it actually generates pretty good predictions about how people do. So this first started this discourse around whether self interest is actually a driving force or not. Or how to what degree it's a driving force started potentially within the lab actually. So there were a number of lab experiments that economists had done drawing from psychology. That showed repeatedly that individuals are willing to give up money to be able to meet the interests of others. And you know we don't have time now but there's a lot of really nice examples of lab experiments that individuals had done to show exactly how this process worked. But then it was very easy to poke holes in that and to say okay people are really willing to do that. The most simple one is I give you ten dollars how much of that would you like to give to someone anonymously in the other room. And people will give about 40% of that so they'll give about four dollars. And it doesn't matter if you triple that you quadruple that you make that three month salary where you do it in the world. People will give to others. But then a very natural criticism that somebody could have is to say well that's like in the lab you know you're giving people the money and then they probably think they should give it to someone else. How important is it when really some things are on the line. And in particular can this actually provide true motivation and mission. And one area in which this is really important is when we think about motivating employees in the world. And one of the things that come from the private sector is this idea of no margin no mission. So if you don't give people a financial margin they won't have a mission towards their job. That is how you provide employees with motivation is to give them financial margins. Paper performance and incentive design is entirely focused around that in the private sector. Question is is that true. And I was talking with a lot of NGOs who were struggling with thinking about okay well if we wanted those ideas seem to have worked in the private sector although there's a lot of debate about whether those actually worked in the private sector and whether they have actually very perverse effects on employees in their work. But the sad thing is a lot of people in the public health sector were taking these ideas full scale and saying okay well we're about to launch a delivery system for public health. Let's take this idea let's do no margin no mission and give people a financial margin in what they're doing. So what we did to test this was to design and implement a field experiment. So that's kind of like a randomized controlled trial the way you have in medicine but just on a very large scale and where you have control groups so that you can really rigorously test the causal impact of one thing versus another. We did this with an NGO in Zambia called Society for Family Health to look at the prevention of HIV AIDS. And in this process we recruited together with them 1200 entrepreneurs to be able to be part of this process of preventing HIV AIDS and randomly assign them to four treatment groups that kind of represent four different models of how you can motivate people. In the first treatment group was pure volunteer come and be part of our mission be part of this thing and this will be great. In the second we get really high financial margins so they would sell these prophylactics and they could get 90% of the margin back of the product that they sold. And there was low financial incentives and then there was a kind of social recognition or status treatment which I'll talk about in a second which basically helped to emphasize their connection to the work they were doing. So in fact what we ended up using were hairdressers and barbers who were entrepreneurs in every, not like the ones like the salons you have here they're on every corner in Africa and they do see themselves as entrepreneurs but in fact we tried to find something that for them would be very powerful and what we developed was a thermometer that as you progressed along this path you would get stars and the stars you can see on the left hand side it's like a representation of your contribution to community health. And the idea here was to match this idea that you know what are financial margins they're a way for you to feel connected to the profits of the company so your marginal, your additional piece of effort has an impact on the additional profit of the company and you feel connected to that. What we tried to do in designing this was to help individuals feel connected to the additional social impact that they were having and to see if they could find that connection. And what we indeed found was that that social impact and recognition treatment was twice as powerful as even the highest financial margins and we did a number of different tests to figure out why that was the case and it really looks like it was driven by a sense of wanting to contribute to others so we had in the baseline done some of these actually lab experiments where individuals who had given more, they had been given something like $10 give to an HIV AIDS charity, those who had been given more from the beginning were also those who were more likely to volunteer etc. Now those were then randomly assigned to all of these different treatments of those guys who had the highest kind of desire to serve from the beginning those were even more motivated by this social impact condition. So it was a way of leveraging, of harnessing that underlying desire to give and to serve with this. Now there were lots of other reasons here but it started, so there's a lot that we're doing now to kind of tease apart different things new ones that we're doing but it started the discourse on we need to take these non-monetary incentives, these non-monetary motivations seriously just look at exactly the comparison with financial incentives and what we called this was a form of altruistic capital that not only we as individuals have but that as an organization you can have so if you look at just the difference here as an organization the altruistic capital is actually twice as valuable to you as a financial capital that you could put towards the same thing and much cheaper. So what we've now done is try to think about the concept of leveraging this intrinsic desire to serve and to think about in a number of different organizations how do we harness and build altruistic capital both in individuals in academia in the field. I just was in London and we met with some of the folks at HSBC who are struggling a lot with the sense of meaning that has been lost in their work. So for example they told me about some of the employees that used to be very proud when they would go to a dinner party and their mother-in-law would say hey this person works at HSBC and he's a managing director there and now he just cowers in shame. And so their sense of purpose has been lost in their work and the entire organization is trying to think about what does this sense of purpose look like and yet their incentive schemes are exactly the same as they've had before and so they can have all this communications on one side but if they're not actually designing the incentives correctly then how does that work? So we were meeting with them with the colleagues who were, you know, study incentive design within academia and within economics to say okay how do we, I mean we had to struggle, how do we as academics and economists take into account purpose in our incentive design theories of motivation and incentive design and what does that imply for how we design incentives in a large bank like HSBC that has to think about now a very big thing that they struggle with and all of this was really that for no matter what field we're in I mean this, especially the conversation with the banking sector made me think, you know we have made heroes out of the doctors and those who work in the public health organizations or those who work in development. I think sometimes it's behind as we even make this mistake of thinking okay if you work in the NGO sector or you work in something called service then that's, you know, that's really where all the altruistic capital is and we've vilified for some reasons that we've seen over the last few years in the financial crisis the kind of greed that might go into this other sector of banking and yet again if we take our guidance from Adobe Ha we see that work, any work done in the spirit of service is the highest form of worship and so if we really take that seriously and we say any work done in the spirit of service is the highest form of worship and that that is the source of motivation how do we truly integrate that as a source of motivation into our theories of economic motivation and decision making and incentive design and into then how we design incentives and organizations and work environments in the field in practice. What I hope that all of us could potentially take from today and I'm so grateful actually for the Association for Baha'i Studies for choosing this topic of learning and action and this ability to try to have this discourse about co-producing knowledge is that we have such extraordinary gems in the Baha'i writings and in the way that those writings can change the way we interpret the data that we see in the world. How do we translate and bring those gems into a discourse that is affecting the base, the true base of scientific knowledge and not for us to need to think that we have to be completely in revolutionary fervor for us to affect the base of scientific knowledge then in fact science itself progresses incrementally and that incremental change is very powerful and if we can create that incremental change while co-producing that knowledge together with the field and with practice then that's maybe what we call Nur An Nur, you know, light upon light of what we can do to bring these things forward and just in this last thing of having ABS and you know these conferences not be one-off things we were just talking this morning about that. This is for me actually coming to the point of doing this presentation actually went through a lot of dialogue with my colleagues about this and actually started a whole discourse around what does this co-production of knowledge look like in macroeconomics what does it look like in market design who won the market design as a field that won the Nobel Prize in economics last year and in fact actually does this co-production really well what does it look like in development economics and for us to have these dialogues and what I hope for all of you is that you can take this and everything else that has happened over the last few days and be able to put it into practice and change the discourse in your fields as well.