Incommensurate abstractions and the (re)quantification of monetary amounts: how Western Kenyans measure and are measured in a behavioral economic experiment

ABSTRACT

Revolving around a behavioral economic experiment on temporal discounting conducted in collaboration with a behavioral economist in a Western Kenyan village, this paper excavates a specific type of (re)quantification. The participants of our experiment translated monetary amounts into units of what locally constitutes a satisfying meal. This ‘incommensurate abstraction’ is interpreted as being grounded in a disentangling of money’s numerical character from its potential of abstraction which results in a methodological impasse. Facing the loss of the stabilizing power of an incremental numerical system that allegedly enables and facilitates the commensuration and comparability of monetary amounts, we could no longer control the experiment and had to resort to innovative practices of ‘cooking data’ which, ultimately, were doomed to fail.

KEYWORDS:

• Abstraction
• behavioral economics
• commensuration
• money
• quantification
• Western Kenya

Acknowledgements

First of all, I am very grateful to the people who participated in the experiment. The research would have been impossible without them and the help of my research assistants and enumerators Gilbert Francis Odhiambo and Jack Misiga – two sharp minds with whom I have collaborated since almost 10 years. I also thank two anonymous reviewers and the editorial team of the Journal of Cultural Economy and express my gratitude to Martin Fotta, Hadas Weiss and Tyler Zoanni for reading earlier drafts of the paper. Last but not least, I thank the DFG for supporting the fieldwork upon which this article is based and my colleagues at the CRC ‘Future Rural Africa’ and at the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Mario Schmidt is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School of the Humanities at the University of Cologne. He has published in several journals, including Africa, Journal of Eastern African Studies, Ethnohistory, and HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. Currently, he attempts to excavate the interdisciplinary potential between anthropology and behavioural economics. He is also interested in scrutinizing the economic strategies of educated but unemployed migrants living in Nairobi's tenement housing. Schmidt's latest book Money Counts: Revisiting Economic Calculation, co-edited with Sandy Ross, has been published by Berghahn in 2020.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Place names have been anonymized. I conducted fieldwork in Kaleko in February–April and August–September 2009 together with my colleague Sebastian Schellhaas and returned alone in August–September 2012, February–April 2013, March–April 2014, February–April 2015, August–September 2016, March 2017 (with my colleague Martin Zillinger), November–December 2018 for the experiment, June–July (with my colleague Anna Lisa Ramella) and October 2019.

2 A research analyst of one of the largest Kenyan loan app company told me that they currently analyze the feasibility to lend money to customers who only possess a phone capable of sending SMS-based text messages. This would increase the danger of default as the ‘correct’ calculation of potential customers’ credit scores depends on the data their smartphones collect. Nevertheless, it shows how much economic potential is yet to be explored in the rural areas of Kenya.

3 The anthropological literature on behavioral economics or the inclusion of (economic) experiments remains scarce. Exceptions include Baumard and Sperber (2010), Pickles (2020), Rottenburg (2009) and Stafford (2008).

4 As can be seen in the instructions (see supplementary data), the experiment also included a real-effort task and a variant of a dictator game.

5 As the experiment's results are not the main topic of this paper, let me just rush through my colleague's findings: (1) People are not as impatient as they themselves and others suspected during interviews before the experiment. Overall, participants were rather patient. (2) Participants are more patient when they choose for others. This effect, however, cannot be explained by any of our research parameters such as present bias. (3) The different time frames are less important than expected.

6 The green arrows between row 1 and row 2 are less important as most participants were not yet incentivized by the interest rates offered so that the majority did not choose option D or E.

7 In the end, 11.64% of the choices were considered inconsistent and removed from the statistically analyzed sample.

8 Further discussions in the field revealed different standards of ‘enough’ such as the term olo riyo nono (‘better than going with nothing’) which is used to refer to the smallest unit of sugar, but also denotes amounts of food that are, somewhat between ‘nothing’ and ‘a meal’.

9 Leaving the equation of numerosity, abstraction, and commensurability unchallenged makes it impossible to understand monetary amounts and their cognitive interpretation as ‘epistemic things’ (Rheinberger 2010). They cannot be understood to exist prior to the experiment as such, i.e. as pre-existing preferences only to be ‘drawn out’ of the participants’ minds.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft: [Grant Numbers SCHM 3192/2-1 and Transregio 228].