Where do you intervene in a cycle?

In economics, there are supply side and demand side economists. Some believe it is consumer demand that drives the economy. Others believe you can stimulate the economy by giving corporations more money to hire people with. That’s one cycle. If you’re going to intervene in that cycle, where do you start?

Another cycle is the cycle of poverty. You could probably describe this cycle in many different ways, but here’s mine: lack of education leads to inability to get a job leads to inadequate housing and poor housing conditions. Lack of education and poverty lead to a higher likelihood of single parenting, which means that mothers will be more frazzled and not have time to educate themselves to get better jobs. Their kids will suffer from bad living conditions and poor nutrition and won’t be able to learn, even if they had good schools to go to.

If you’re going to intervene in that cycle, where do you start?

Then there’s the research cycle. Quantitative research is about counting things. You have to count them in order to figure out what is going on. Inevitably, you will find an area where you lack information and lack the ability to begin to study that empty area of knowledge.

Qualitative researchers are good at looking at examples of things and figuring out how to understand them; how to categorize them. You have to have things to count before you count them.

So where do you start? Quant or Qual? Which comes first?

You can talk about any one of these examples or come up with an example of your own. What I’m looking for is a way of figuring out the best place to intervene. This is fairly theoretical, but it has a lot of real world applications. We have limited resources. We want to make them go as far as possible. How do we decide where to spend it? Remember we have to make a collective decision because this is for the collective good of whatever group the decision affects.