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 plus transfers has been lacking.
In a paper in the American Economic Review, authors Jacob Moscona plus 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 plus ultimately shape inequality.
Jacob Moscona recently spoke with Tyler Smith about the difference between kin-based societies plus age-based societies plus how they affect development policies.
The edited highlights of that conversation are below, plus the full interview can be heard using the podcast player. Tyler Smith: What are age sets, plus 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 plus 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 grup 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 plus second cousins, plus members of the extended family living closer together plus those relationships being more a part of everyday life.
Smith: You studied several different policy experiments in Kenya plus Uganda. Can you give an overview of the policies you’re looking at here plus why you chose them?
Moscona: The distinction between kin-based plus 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 plus 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 plus 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.