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Dr. Reshmaan Hussam ’09, 15, once wanted to be a “psychohistorian” like the protagonist of the Isaac Asimov Foundation’s novels, which combines sociology, history, and statistics to save the world. Perhaps, he thought, such a psychohistorian would have made sense of the harsh and disturbing contrasts that led him to spend his childhood in Virginia and his parents ’family visiting Bangladesh. He remembers hard the guilt and confusion he drove with his family in Dhaka traffic, barefoot children knocking on windows, watching them beg for food and money. When he discovered the economy of development, looking at human behavior and experimental rigor, the field felt as close as possible to Asimov’s psychohistory.
With a degree in economics from MIT, Hussam reinforced his natural interest in liberal arts with his skills in mathematics, experimental design, and data analysis. He took classes with Drs. Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo ’99, Nobel laureate Abdul Latif Jameel of the Poverty Action Laboratory (J-PAL), after entering the development economy as his doctoral consultant. “There are dollar bills you can get all over the world,” Banerjee recalls. “You don’t have to make a single million-dollar change; look for small dollar bills.”
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Hussam built his MIT thesis around a small bill change: West Bengal hand washing behaviors. Millions of dollars had already been spent on handwashing in public health campaigns, and there was little to show for that. So people were skeptical of Hussam’s proposal to design a simple soap dispenser that records usage, fill it with soap bars as an alternative to the rough bars used to clean houses, place them visible in subjects ’homes, and use data. motivate homes to develop the habit of washing their hands.
But it worked. Giving homes cheap and affordable soaps and distributors will simply bring health benefits to children: within a few months, they will be larger in homes with distributors and carry more weight than in homes without them. One key, he says, was to “ignite the excitement of attracting children so that they can be transferred to their parents.”
Hussam calls his results a call to “think about how people in the world of employee development make decisions about preventive health with more empathy and nuance”. It is this compassionate approach that links his projects, among others, in a recent study examining the meaning of work for Rohingya refugees fleeing Myanmar to escape genocidal violence.
After joining Harvard Business School in 2017, Hussam spent four years working with colleagues on a project that provided refugee and different levels of employment to refugees in Bangladeshi camps. Usually, he says, camps are places of great laziness. Even when NGO staff organize culinary or cultural activities, they don’t pay much attention. Hussam says some may interpret the behavior as laziness, “what we haven’t found is, they’re pretty desperate to work.” “Working, compared to doing activities, seems to provide a sense of meaning.”
During the experiment, Hussam and his colleagues paid a group to work on the survey for two months. A second group received the same salary without the necessary labor. And a third control group received a much smaller number in exchange for a brief survey. In the case of men, “we have realized that money alone — which is a lot of money considering their poverty — hardly improves psychosocial well-being,” she says. Instead, the key was work. Men who paid for work were less depressed and had less stress and 22% less suicidal ideation than those who did not work. Women’s issues, from money and work, saw improvements in well-being, given the independence that money gives.
In the end, “despite poverty, material benefits alone will not be enough when people are depressed in a mental or emotional state,” Hussam concluded. Attempts to help must come from shared respect and humanity. He hopes his work will serve to humanize the millions trapped in refugee crises around the world: “a place to call home, people who can be contacted, and people who have lost direction or purpose”.
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