Understanding economic behavior through hygiene
Graduate student Reshmaan Hussam has always seen economics as more than a collection of numbers: For her, it also entails history, health, and human behavior. Now, as a fifth-year PhD student in economics at MIT, she applies this outlook to understanding sanitation and hygiene behavior in the developing world, with an eye toward affecting policy and behavioral changes. Economics first piqued Hussam’s curiosity in high school, when a summer course exposed her to the experimental and behavioral aspects of the field; since then, she’s kept empathy at the forefront of her work in modeling human economic interactions. And after picking up Max Weber’s “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” in college, she became acutely interested in how religion impacts economic choices. Growing up with an uncle who managed a microfinance institution in Bangladesh — where Hussam still has family — gave her early exposure to this particular population’s financial needs...