There is a concept that social psychologists refer to as out-group homogeneity effect.
We perceive members of our own group to be relatively heterogeneous, i.e. we see variation. Everyone else, so-called “out-group members”, however, seem relatively homogeneous
In other words, we tend to think of our group as a mosaic and people from other groups as monotone.
People really do see more variation in personality among in-group members, an attitude confirmed by a number of studies.
It’s an intuitive concept. We know the people we spend more time with (our in-group members) better. Although we all have something in common, whether it’s ethnicity, colleagues, family members, we aware of their individual personalities and idiosyncrasies. Because they’re around us all the time, we have to distinguish them from one another.
We have less information about people from groups we don’t have as much contact with, Norwegians, for example. (Full disclosure – I’m a quarter Norwegian.) We’ve heard they eat a lot of fish, win lots of medals at the Winter Olympics, drill for oil. We might know that they’ve descended from Vikings but are now apparently very socially-minded Nordics.
But the view from inside Norway is, understandably, rather more nuanced than the stereotype. They are only slightly more blond and blue-eyed than people in the rest of the world. And there is a raging debate happening right now between citizens who want the country to stop oil and gas exploration (it is one of the world’s exporters of both) as it aims for net zero emissions, and those who point to the potential job losses of such a move. Of course, Norwegians do share similarities, but the population is not a monolithic bloc of Jarlsberg cheese.
A natural response
The out-group homogeneity effect makes sense from a biological perspective, too. My research assistant, Hannah Rosenthal, points out that the farther away you are from a group, the more homogeneous it looks, simply because our eyesight has its limits. This is not just true for the nearsighted. It’s harder it is to make out the details. You see the forest, but not the trees.
Taking the long view, stereotypes and biases have probably served us quite well. They probably saved a few lives.
When our ancestors first encountered a spear-carrying stranger from another tribe, it would have been prudent to first consider them as just like all the other “others” we’d come across. That is, as a possible threat. So, getting into a defensive crouch to size him up would be a smart first reaction. Only after examination, and exchanges, would the other tribe member solidify into an individual, perhaps one to be trusted.
Why it’s a problem
So what? You might respond.
Well, out-group homogeneity effect happens to be a source of bias. It leads to stereotyping, an oversimplified belief that people who share certain characteristics are pretty much all the same.
When we think of outgroup members as being more similar to one another, they risk being stereotyped or seen as interchangeable rather than complex and unique individuals.
This raises also raises an interesting question. Do in-group members feel less need to become more diverse because the inside perspective feels quite heterogeneous already, thank you very much?
When you think about it, it would be odd if such a bias didn’t exist.
This is not an excuse to say, “Hey, what can I do? I’m human, we’ve all got our biases.”
Rather, it is a reminder to reflect on the fact that people in other groups are probably just as diverse as the group you belong to. That applies to groups based on ethnicity, political ideology, nationality, profession, and any other group characteristic you can come up with.
Getting up close and personal, that is, spending time with people from that “other” group is a good remedy
The day before Kabul fell to the Taliban, Salima Mazari, district governor near Mazar-e-Sharif, said this to the Associated Press:
“There will be no place for women. In the provinces controlled by the Taliban, no women exist there anymore, not even in the cities. They are all imprisoned in their homes.”
Other than former colleagues, I don’t have a personal connection to Afghanistan and have never been there. The closest I’ve gotten was standing on the banks of the Amu Darya River on the Tajikistan side, looking south across the border at the legendary country and “graveyard of empires”. But it is hard not to feel that what is happening in Afghanistan affects us all.
Scenes of desperate Afghans crowding outside of Kabul’s international airport have dominated the news as the US and NATO military withdraw. In pulling out, the West is abandoning its incomplete state-building project. It is also abandoning most of the people of Afghanistan to their fate.
What is shocking about the unfolding crisis in Afghanistan is that it has happened so rapidly, and to so many people at once. 40 million, to be precise. First the swift takeover by the Taliban. Then the shutting down of the country’s borders, and now Kabul’s international airport.
With the near complete takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban, Afghan evacuees and refugees are the lucky ones. They’ve made it out. Everyone else is waking up in a country that could turn into the world’s largest open-air prison.
And Afghan women potentially face a triple exclusion. They will be prevented from leaving the country, prevented from working, and confined to their homes.
With the Taliban in control of all border points and access to the airport, virtually all Afghans are being blocked from leaving the country. Not being allowed out is a particularly severe form of exclusion. Ask any prisoner. Or anyone from the former East Germany, or North Korea, or Gaza.
It could well be that Afghan women will no longer be able to participate in professional and civic life. Reports are emerging that women have already been sent home from schools and workplaces.
Zabihullah Mujahid, the Taliban spokesman, said that women should stay home, for their own safety.
Depending on who joins or allies with the Taliban, people will sort themselves into either guards or prisoners.
And, as in a prison, it seems likely that neither privacy nor property rights will be respected. People are vulnerable to searches of their homes and cell phones anytime a man with a gun shows up at their door. Under previous Taliban rule, women were not even safe in their own homes.
Even worse, this could be a prison full of untrained rogue “guards”. It is an open question how much control the Taliban leadership has over its men.
Now, just take a moment to picture the Taliban training its forces on how to deal with and speak to women. Try not to laugh…or cry.
It is one thing to end a war and leave in haste. It is another to condemn the country’s citizens to become prisoners in their own land.
Let’s assume that no country is going to be able to defend humanitarian rights in Afghanistan. The leverage that the outsider world still has –the Taliban need money to govern – will be used to ensure internal stability and avoid more chaos that would contribute to an outflow of refugees.
So, now the fundamental question becomes: What can other countries do, from outside the prison walls, to help the Afghan people, and in particular, its women and girls?
I don’t have an answer.
In the meantime, @LinaAbiRafeh, intrepid women’s rights activist, is posting ways you can help.
Today dark clouds hang over Afghanistan as the Taliban takes over the country. The situation may soon deteriorate into a humanitarian crisis, leading to a mass exodus of refugees to neighboring countries and beyond.
However the story in Afghanistan unfolds, at least four critical global developments will keep migration at the top of many country’s policy agendas for decades to come.
More people crossing borders, whether as refugees or economic migrants, ensures that countries will be unable to ignore questions of inclusion and exclusion.
Conflict and terrorism. A 2019 paper estimated that global conflicts were at an all-time high since 1945. all-time high since 1945. Ongoing as well as new conflicts and terrorism will result in more refugees and economic migrants. Pressure will increase on countries to either accommodate more people from outside their borders, or they will use ever more draconian measure to keep people out.
Climate change and the devastation wrought by extreme weather events are pushing people to cross borders. Last year, in a lengthy article on the subject, New York Times declared that the “The Great Climate Migration” has begun. An unprecedented number of people will migrate to more temperate zones. Madagascar, already extremely poor, is suffering from a devastating famine. UN organizations are linking it to climate change.
Democratic backsliding. In 2021, Freedom House reported the 15th consecutive year of decline in global freedom. Lack of participation in democratic processes across the globe—Tunisia, the one Arab country where the Arab Spring did not end in failure, is the latest example—means fewer people are participating politically. If people can’t vote at the ballot box, they will vote with their feet, and get out if they can. Already thousands of people have fled Belarus to escape President Lukashenko’s violent crackdown after elections were rigged.
Falling birth rates and ageing populations in the rich world are contributing to a labor deficit. The number of births per 1,000 is now half of what it was in 1950, and fertility rates are falling well below replacement levels. Unlike the push factors above, low fertility will act as a pull factor for migration. If societies are to continue to prosper, higher workforce participation will be key. This will involve skills training and better childcare options to make it easier for those who don’t work, while making it easier for more migrants to enter.
Meanwhile, racial injustice in the US and elsewhere has been brought into relief by the killing of George Floyd in 2020, and the broader recognition that the issue can no longer be ignored. Many more people have become aware that African Americans and other minorities still don’t enjoy the rights and privileges other citizens take for granted. Hate crimes against people of Asian descent in the U.S. are up.
These global developments all but guarantee that the issue of inclusion, who gets in and who doesn’t, will only grow more acute as the century progresses.
Broader inclusion and the diversity that comes with can bring huge benefits, but it won’t be easy, either for societies or organizations.
How policy makers manage these pressures and processes, without inciting more backlash from anti-immigrant groups, will pose a major challenge for policy makers for generations to come.
In many countries, the urge to erect more barriers—physical and otherwise—will compete with calls to let more people cross.
Can we muster the empathy to recognize that anyone of us could be a migrant, excluded, and struggling to start a new life? Can enough of us muster that empathy?
CNN has reported that some people in Missouri are getting vaccinated in secret to avoid backlash from loved ones.
And thus, Covid has offered up yet another way to demonstrate tribal loyalty. First it was face masks; now it’s vaccinations.
Vaccine hesitancy has a range of underlying causes, from fears about side effects, to distrust in government, to skepticism over the risks. I have relatives who believe Covid-19 is a plot hatched either by the government or by Bill Gates to control people and reap profits.
Whatever the cause, American society is bifurcating into two groups, the vaccinated and the voluntarily unvaccinated. In a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll, 58% of Republicans said they do not intend to get vaccinated (or at least that is what they are telling pollsters), compared to 6% of Democrats.
I’m all in favor of diversity. However, dividing ourselves into “vaccination tribes” may not be the best way to celebrate our differences.
Alas, my current research on inclusion and exclusion leads me to conclude that as long as the human race exists, we will continue to self-select into tribes. Social identity theory posits that we categorize people, figure out the group that matches our identity, and then compare ourselves with other groups.
Our self-esteem is bound up in belonging to a group, especially if it is high status. This is how humans are made, and almost any excuse will do: skin color (but not eye color, for some reason, at least outside of this fascinating experiment), ethnicity, religion, party affiliation.
Pick a difference, no matter how arbitrary or trivial, and someone will be out there with a crowbar, jamming it in to widen the crack between two groups.
If not enough of the U.S. population gets vaccinated, the virus may continue to mutate, more people will die unnecessarily, the crisis will drag on, and more lockdowns may be imposed.
If vaccine hesitancy isn’t overcome soon, the early vaccination successes may yet become a case study of “divided we fall”.
Over the past eight years, I’ve evaluated a number of United States Agency for International Development (USAID) projects, about two per year, on average. This and a follow-up post (to come) sum up things I’ve learned.
The post is mainly aimed at evaluators who haven’t conducted USAID evaluations but are interested in doing so, or are just curious about how the process works.
I’ll go over the somewhat dry, but important nuts and bolts issues of doing USAID evaluations as an independent consultant. The next post on this subject will cover implementing the evaluations.
Some context
For those who may not have great familiarity with it, USAID is the largest U.S. bilateral development agency. It devotes budget resources to helping countries in the name of U.S. national security and economic prosperity . These days, that amounts to over $19 billion worth of foreign assistance. (The Department of State manages a similar amount.) That’s a tiny slice of the total U.S. annual budget of $4.4 trillion, as of 2019.
Interestingly enough, after four years of the Trump Administration, both USAID and its budget have survived largely intact. Given the attitudes expressed by the President on the subject of foreigners and the countries they live in, this might seem surprising. However, foreign assistance is generally a low priority for most American presidents, and quite possibly off the radar for the 45th.
Although USAID funds hundreds of projects that vary in focus, scope, size and geographic location, they have one thing in common: at some point, they all get evaluated. That’s where evaluators come in.
USAID’s guidelines call for its country offices to spend between 5 and 10 percent on personnel resources for performance management and, out of that, to earmark about 3 percent on external performance and impact evaluation. A rough, back-of-the-envelope estimate suggests this is equivalent to somewhere between $14 and $28 million per year on evaluations. Dozens of companies vie for these contracts, and they rely heavily on independent consultants to put their evaluation teams together.
Nationality
Work on USAID evaluations is not restricted to US citizens. It is qualifications, not nationality, that matter.
Often, evaluation team members hired by consultant firms are not even based in the US. I’ve been on teams made up of colleagues of all nationalities, who live all over the world, and we only meet in the country of the assignment to do the field work.
Some firms have a policy of prioritizing the hiring of country nationals. This makes sense, as there are no international travel costs, locals know the country better and are well-connected, not to mention that their rates are lower, reflecting the local labor market conditions. COVID-related travel restrictions have created even more opportunities for country nationals.
English language skills are important for evaluation team members, but not every team member needs to be proficient in written English.
A typical team includes a mix of international consultants and local consultants. I’ve been on teams as small as two and as large as eight, not including any surveyors responsible for collecting quantitative data.
The diversity that comes from a mix of international and local perspectives improves the quality of an evaluation. International consultants bring experience from work in other countries, while local consultants know their own country better than anyone from outside.
Contractual arrangements
On evaluations, individual consultants are contracted under what is referred to Short Term Technical Assistance, or STTA. The alternative would be to work as a full-time staff for the consulting firm.
Individual consultants never work directly for USAID on evaluations, in my experience. They are always sub-contracted by private firms or NGOs that have contract with USAID.
Sometimes the staff from the firms are part of evaluation teams, but usually they provide managerial support, directing and managing the evaluation process. This includes liaising with USAID, handling administration and logistics issues, ensuring deadlines are met, quality control, report formatting, etc.
Daily rate
USAID contracts pay by the day. That means they are based on a daily rate, and on a set number of days agreed to in advance.
In development lingo, contract days are referred to as “level of effort’ or LOE. The term actually makes sense, since the number of days signals the amount of effort you are expected to put in. It should guide you when managing your time.
For example, if you are subcontracted as a STTA by a firm (the contractor) to do a USAID evaluation, you may get 40 days of work (your LOE is 40), which is what you have to finalize all the work. I’ve had contracts from 22 to 60 days, with 45 being the average.
On their invoices, however, normally consultants are asked to bill by the hour. Most consulting firms will have their won combination invoice/timesheet template which consultants are asked to complete and submit on a monthly basis.
There is a maximum USAID rate, or “USAID max,” above which contractors will almost never go. In 2020 the USAID maximum was $698 per day. I’ve only heard of one case where a consultant refused to take USAID max, which was well below her standard rate. She told the firm that wanted to hire her, “This my rate, take it or leave it.” She got the contract. That type of case seems to be rare, however. It is up to you whether you are willing to work for USAID max, try to negotiate more, or not work on USAID evaluations.
Beyond the total amount you receive in fees (your daily rate times the number of contract days), all your expenses will be covered. This includes hotel, meals and incidentals, communication, and transportation. You will also normally receive a standard per diem (set by the Foreign Service) to cover meals and incidentals.
Firms usually place consultants in very decent hotels. This is not Peace Corps work where you live in a village for months and years at a time. There is little chance of going native while doing an evaluation.
The biodata form
USAID uses what’s called a biodata form (technically the Contractor Employee Biographical Data Sheet) also referred to as the “1420 form.” As a consultant, you need to fill it out by listing all your employment or assignments going back three years. It only gives you three lines, though. So, if you have had more than three assignments during that time period (which applies to most consultants), simply attach an addendum to the form listing the rest.
In the past, the 1420 form had a column for salary or daily rate for each assignments. Asking about salary history is no longer legal in many US states, as it puts the consultant at a disadvantage, so the form no longer has a column for salary. However, consultant firms will probably still ask you to provide a rationale for why you are requesting x for your daily rate.
The contractor role
The firm that hires consultants normally provides good management and back-office support. It may also provide one or more of the team members. The firm will manage the schedule, arrange travel, hire local firms or consultants, manage the relationship with USAID, and relieve you of other administrative matters. This allows you, as a core team member, to focus on the substantive aspects of the evaluation.
There are firms that take good care of their consultants and are professional in managing the entire process. If you have a good experience with them, and they have a good experience with you, chances are high that you will work with them again. There are also bad firms that you will want to avoid. Working for an unfamiliar firm means taking a risk. Sometimes the risk is worth it.
Evaluation schedule
USAID doesn’t tend to dawdle, at least once the evaluation is ready to start. It is best to approach USAID evaluations in a spirit of ruthless efficiency. The entire evaluation may be completed in 3-6 months and you may only get 10 days or less to draft a final report. This is in stark contrast to the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) timelines, where an evaluation can drag on for years and years.
How to get work on USAID projects
A question that comes up a lot is, how can I work on a USAID evaluation if I haven’t worked on one before? That’s because consulting firms, when hiring for a USAID evaluation, are looking for prior USAID experience. That can be a hurdle. (USAID vets the proposed evaluation team, by the way, and can ask a firm to replace a consultant if they don’t believe he or she is qualified.)
Of course, logic dictates that, at some point, every single person working on a USAID evaluation (or a USAID project, or at USAID itself, for that matter) initially had no USAID experience. My advice is, get as close as you can to the real thing – maybe you were on a project that partnered with USAID, or have done an evaluation project with a different US agency, or worked on an assignment for a similar bilateral agency? Those are all possible entry points for the would be novice USAID evaluator.
It can also happen that a firm is simply desperate for someone with your qualifications, and that will be enough to force the door open. It also never hurts to demonstrate your enthusiasm and eagerness to do the work. Recruiters like to see that spark of interest, and it can make you stand out. I find that the work is, in fact, often interesting, and usually enjoyable.
Having worked on a number of USAID evaluations, I’ve come away with an overall positive impression – the work that’s done is, by and large of good quality, and really does seem to help people. Which, as a U.S. taxpayer, is good to see.
The COVID-19 pandemic is teaching us many hard lessons. One is that flow – not just of money but of all sorts of things – is fundamental to a functioning society. On both the material and non-material level, life is enabled by circulation, by constant movement. One could even say that relentless movement is one of modernity’s main characteristics. Charlie Chaplin, frantically trying to keep up with his tasks on the factory assembly line in Modern Times is emblematic not just of work (the kind of work which few in high-income countries experience anymore) but of many people’s daily lives.The coronavirus has now jammed up the gears in that machine.
When COVID-19 arrived, my work-life routine, like that of billions of others, was upended. I cancelled my flight to Dakar just hours before take-off, and instead spent the next week getting up at 5 am for marathon meeting sessions with my Senegalese counterparts. My first virtual business trip. A long-planned Italy vacation – scratched and postponed indefinitely. Dinners with friends, meetings with colleagues, leisurely morning café outings: delete, delete, delete. Maybe the only thing that didn’t change was my newspaper landing on my front steps every morning. The presses didn’t stop rolling. Yes, a throwback to earlier days and a relief for eyes which spend the rest of the days staring at a computer.
The effect of the pandemic has been to block or slow the many streams that comprise daily life. The virus, like humans, thrives on flow and exchange. Perhaps few of us paid much heed before to the pulsing undercurrent of money, goods, public transport, people, knowledge, and much more, until these things began to suddenly back up with the onset of the crisis and government responses. So, fairly soon (although not soon enough), starting in the city at the epicenter, Wuhan, China, governments began to curtail movement of anything that would aid its spread.
Money turned into molasses as commercial activity ground to a halt, shut down for the safety of workers as well as shrinking as consumption suddenly dropped off. Spending on the non-essential stuff, plummeted. Remittances, the money migrants send to their home countries, shrank by about 20 percent compared with 2019, with ripple effects in the home economies. And with their fall, a huge number of people who relied on them are expected to slip back into poverty.
Many supply chains were disrupted, or seized up, as industries halted production to keep workers safe. Other supply chains couldn’t cope with spiking demand. Toilet paper is now back on the shelves, but just try buying a bicycle these days, or a dog! There’s a long wait-list. A bicycle store in Florida first saw a boom in sales when the crisis hit as many people saw biking as an ideal pastime. A few months later it had to shut down when it was unable to source more bicycles, as manufacturers couldn’t keep up with demand. We now know that cycling is, well, counter-cyclical, in pandemic times, at least. But stop and think for a moment – when else have you heard that because demand for an item was so high, the store that specialized in those items went out of business?
A corollary to the rise in cycling was the fall in motorized vehicle traffic, to the extent that the skies cleared in many cities, and wildlife made a tentative steps into urban areas, to check out what had happened in the years since their habitat had been paved and built over.
The flow of knowledge imparted to growing minds has been curtailed with the closing of schools and universities. Online learning, if a child even has access, acts as a poor substitute and some wonder whether there will be a lost generation as an estimated 90 percent of school age children have been affected. Of course, this assumes that all those children were getting a decent education in the first place, an assumption that doesn’t always hold. In some countries, teachers don’t show up, and textbooks are outdated if they even are available. (I’m not offering this as a solution, but can mention in passing that I went to a Waldorf school, where we didn’t have any textbooks at all until high school. We had to write and illustrate our own “main lesson” books.)
In many cities around the world, the streets emptied as the flow of pedestrians petered out under lockdown measures. The seasonal tide of tourists virtually disappeared as international travel was sharply curtailed. In May 2020 international tourist numbers were down a whopping 98% compared with the previous year. Given that before the pandemic, the new buzzword was flygskam, Swedish for flight shame (stemming from the carbon emissions produced by flying) that would seem to be a silver lining.
The importance of a constant and steady flow will be familiar to most homeowners. In my experience, the vast majority of house repair problems stem from either too much or too little flow. Almost all the headaches we’ve had to deal with in our house over the past 10 years have been linked to electric current, gas, water, sewage and air (conditioning) not working, i.e. not moving through the system as they should. The normal circulation of the elements stopped or was rather in excess, when it came to water and, er, sewage. The optimal is an even, well-managed flow.
The COVID-induced economy and societal blockages are logical, if, at least in most cases disastrous for many people. COVID spreads through interactions and contact and the less of this there is, the safer we all are and the sooner the virus is beaten.
If we consider the factors that that inhibit the circulation processes vital to society and economy, both positive and negative examples come to mind. Among the negative: a heavy-handed bureaucracy which, for example, hobbles government service provision; trade barriers which reduce optimal allocation of capital, and increase the cost of goods; regulations which limit commercial activity. Unrelated to the pandemic, the US mail delivery service is another example of systemic flow that has been impeded. (Many suspect an ulterior motive behind the introduction of cost-cutting measures so close to the November US elections, when the use of mail-in ballots will be widespread.)
People in poor countries, however, don’t need a virus to slow life down and make it more difficult. Barriers to flow are par for the course. Inadequate or dilapidated infrastructure that blocks things from moving smoothly – roads, railways, electricity lines, water supply systems, and so on. Sluggish bureaucracies that dam up public service provision. Supply chains with key nodes missing.
In a way, with the onset of the pandemic and its accompanying precautionary polices, populations in developed countries, especially the poor and marginalized in these countries, have been experiencing a taste of low-income country lifestyle. That is, how inconvenient and difficult life can be when movement is inhibited. (A key difference, generally speaking, is that in low-income countries the poor form a much larger part of the population than in high-income countries.) Asian and African countries, meanwhile, are coping quite well, occupying the bottom half of the country list of fatality cases per population. Senegal is doing much better than the US.
It is hard to see how Western nations will come out of this crisis better than before. Combined with the massive recessions sweeping the world, we may be witnessing a convergence, of sorts, between the Global North and, Latin America excepted, the Global South.
My favorite tweet of 2020 so far has been a discussion of the informal coalitions building at the protests in Portland. The tweet read “If we add Dads & Folks With Leaf-blowers to bike/wine moms, Riot Ribs, skate-or-die bloc, the portable dance party speakers, and Guy Who Endlessly Picks Up Trash, I think Portland’s insurrection might now just be ‘everyone who wants to hang in a park in the summer vs the cops”. I found the tweet provocative, not only because it was juxtaposed with video of peaceful protesters being tear gassed, but because it spoke to the weird coalitions rising up in the fight for social justice. I’ve been watching livestreams of the protests most nights now, and something has made me curious. What about this context is different? Why Portland? Why now? And how did this diverse group of individuals find itself willing to stand together and face tear gas, rubber bullets and possible arrest night after night?
This blog post looks at how inclusion and exclusion affect the emergence and success of social movements. While a lot of the language is specific to Portland, which is soon to see its 70th day of continuous protest, the literature of social inclusion has applications for broader movements as well.
I fondly remember my first real taste of Portland-style protests. As a senior at Reed College, I was looking for anything to distract me from the initial experiments of my thesis, which weren’t yielding the statistical significance I was after. So, when Joey Gibson, leader of the infamous alt-right white supremacy group Patriot Prayer, decided to hold a demonstration at Salmon Street Springs, a favored spot for Portland activists of all sorts, I saw counter-protesting as a justifiable diversion from my work. With a group of classmates, I headed towards Southwest Portland and joined in on the action. The first hour or two in that Plaza were just what I was looking for: the sun was out, the weather nice, and I was surrounded by thousands of like-minded individuals showing up in the name of social justice. There was, of course, yelling and occasional conflict between counter-protestors and Patriot Prayer and the riot police protecting them, but altogether the day was a peaceful demonstration about inclusion. Our coalition was larger, stronger, more diverse, and our vision of Portland had no room for white supremacy and fringe right-wing politics.
But as the protesters grew in number, the message changed. Police became more liberal in their use of pepper-spray, batons and, eventually, tear gas. Protestors started pushing back. Eventually Patriot Prayer, apparently satisfied with the reaction they had provoked, moved across the Columbia River to hold a larger rally in Vancouver, Washington. Counter-protestors followed, as did Portland riot police, already agitated from the earlier demonstrations, and eager to reinforce the Vancouver police in cracking down on counter-protests. That early evening was peppered with clashes between counter-protestors and police, and any semblance of the day’s earlier message was replaced with explicit antagonism for the police and the white-supremacists we saw them as harboring.
Since then, Portland has been a hotbed for political protesting by both the left and the right. I’ve been watching various livestreams of the recent George Floyd protests, particularly Portland, with an optimistic (and admittedly nostalgic) eye. And although a lot of what I witnessed firsthand in the 2017 protest is true of today’s — much is also different. My research lately has focused on inclusion and exclusion, and as the composition of the protestors forming outside of the Hatfield Courthouse in Portland has been sensationalized in the media, I’ve had an opportunity to make some observations on who, and why, people participate in social movements.
Research on social inclusion and exclusion begins with an intuitive premise: human beings have an innate tendency to sort other humans into groups. Some of these group labels are inescapable and inherited — gender, race, ethnicity, etc.— but many are situational or merit based, like professional status, education, or age.
The debate hasn’t been settled on why humans have an urge to include and exclude. Some argue that the behavior increased our ancestors’ evolutionary fitness, others say it relates to conceptions of the self, and others note that similar behavior in other species implies grouping can solve free-rider and common-pool resource problems. Regardless, what we do know is that our sorting procedure has resulted in a vast imbalance in power and resources among groups.
In most modern societies, culture, values, and history have arranged group membership hierarchically, with members of high-status groups receiving the lion share of goods, resources, and power over lower-status groups. However, most people are not exclusively members of high-status groups. The organization of society creates situations in which we belong to multiple groups of conflicting status simultaneously. First-generation college students often report difficulties reconciling their identity as students with other identities. A recent paper discussed the difficulties and stress that men of color experience in high-status employment—some boundaries lose meaning and commonalities can be found, but there are still elements of identity that have to be carefully negotiated around to reconcile identity in a white dominated space. That tension between membership in some high-status groups and some low-status groups can have implications for our perceptions of self-identity. The Social Identity Theory suggests that we tend to pick and choose the group memberships most favorable to us and broadcast that identity to the world, while avoiding association with less favorable social identities. After all, why would an individual prioritize their membership in a low-status group when they could lay claim to membership in a high-status group?
History shows us that when members of low-status groups have limited prospects for individual elevation and mobility, the reaction is collective. The Civil Rights Movement capitalized on shifting cultures and values to renegotiate power structures. Occupy Wall Street, with language centered around the collective “we” was seen by many as an opportunity for economic elevation of the 99% after the 2008 recession. More recently, Bernie Sanders’ populist platform was defined by his campaign slogan “Not Me, Us.” When our battles are insurmountable individually, we turn first and foremost to our group for help.
Today, for many protestors, there seem to be many individually insurmountable problems. Wealth inequality was growing even before COVID-19 restrictions led to massive spikes in unemployment and devastating economic conditions. Police killings of unarmed civilians have likewise ballooned in recent years. And while protestors in Michigan can rally against COVID-19 restrictions by storming government buildings armed with AR-15’s and issuing death threats towards state officials, peaceful gatherings across the country have largely been met with extreme police brutality and harassment. In a time where 30 million Americans don’t have enough to eat and 28 million are facing looming evictions, Congress has spent hundreds of billions of dollars bailing out large companies. For many, it feels like the dividing lines of “us” and “them” have been drawn unfavorably — and seemingly permanently — by forces outside of our control.
In a way, the combined forces of economic collapse, global pandemic, and ineffectual politics have blurred the established hierarchies of society. When unemployment rates have ballooned across all professional and education categories, membership in higher-status earned groups offers little security. When the elderly, children, and veterans — three of the more sacred groups in society — have been beaten and arrested by the police for peaceful protest, the value of those identities diminishes as well.
The importance of inflexible groups has likewise been challenged. White Americans have historically held comfortable relations with the police, and so when a horrifying video surfaces of a Black man struggling to breathe for nine minutes before dying while in police custody, unfortunately, for many Whites it could be easy to dismiss it or disengage. Sadly, it has taken a disruption of high-status group privilege for many to recognize that the language and values of Black Lives Matter overlap with their own. When a group of white moms (another of the most sacrosanct groups in American society) are pepper-sprayed, tear-gassed, and shoved by heavily armored federal agents, the reaction is indignation. “They can’t treat us like that” creates a recognition that for Americans who haven’t enjoyed the same privilege, this treatment is the norm. Suddenly the old hierarchies of group status and privilege lose their meaning.
If federal soldiers are willing to assail your mom with crowd control munitions, what power or status do you really have? These lingering questions have had real impacts — a recent survey reported by the New York Times found that 45% of white protestors were on the streets because of federal responses to protests. Those are significant numbers and paint a picture of formerly privileged individuals recognizing that the previous arrangements of power in America have little meaning anymore. In the words of Frank Leon Roberts, an activist and professor at NYU, “History has been clear that the people who need to change before the dam breaks are people who have been beneficiaries of the existing systems.” When the benefits of the old system are abruptly inaccessible, it forces us to re-examine who shares our ambitions, our concerns, and our values.
A Social Identity Theory reading of the George Floyd protests helps clarify why this was the tipping point for so many white protestors. We present ourselves according to our most valuable and favorable group membership and in a time where pandemics, economic crises, and neglectful policy have suddenly relegated a class of privileged Americans into low-status groups, the only meaningful option for many is collective action.
In Austin, where I am currently living, the protests took a different form than the ones in Portland. The grievances were the same, but the response from police was not. They were marked by violence and antagonism on both sides, but the priority in Austin was listening to unheard voices and working to amplify them. We were there to demonstrate that we were enthusiastic and supportive members of new status arrangements. The intention was not conflict with the agents of high-status groups, but the bolstering and elevation of our side. Speeches in front of the Capitol building reminded us that we are more alike than we are different, and the backing track of an impromptu jazz band on a street corner and high-fives from the cars we were walking through re-affirmed that we were the majority. In these difficult times, we need each other more than ever. As the graffiti on a boarded-up store front we passed reminded us, for our collective action to succeed, for the new coalitions to mean anything, for social change to be lasting, “we must do better and we must be better.”
*Noah Truesdale, currently studying for a Master’s degree in political science at NYU, is a research intern with Nils Junge Consulting
We are constantly reminded of the boundaries which divide us – men from women, young from old, white from black. The growing response to the death of George Floyd, the increased partisan divide in our communities, and even the coronavirus all seem to highlight our differences, even as a movement to overcome them gathers pace. As social justice enters the mainstream, many are fighting to for the scales of society to balance more evenly. Inclusion is the word on the street.
However, there are instances in which exclusion is the moral option. Take the recent ruling by the United States Supreme Court in the case of McGirt v. Oklahoma, whichhas virtually reshaped the map of Oklahoma overnight.
Predicating a decision in a criminal justice case on the legitimacy of 19th-Century treaties between Congress and the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, the Supreme Court ruled that the majority of land in the eastern part of Oklahoma must be restored as definitionally protected Native lands. The surprising 5-4 decision, penned by Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch, affirmed that over three million acres of land in Eastern Oklahoma be excluded from the state government’s jurisdiction and re-designated as a Native reservation. The opinion, which began with a blistering indictment of the United States legacy of mistreatment and violence against Native populations during the Trail of Tears — when 60,000 Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw and Choctaw Native Americans were forced to leave their homelands by President Andrew Jackson’s Indian removal policy — is being widely celebrated by groups advocating for increased Native autonomy and power.
The Supreme Court’s ruling in McGirt is thus seen as a step in correcting a long history of forced assimilation, violence, and manipulation. The case addressed the question of the state’s power over autonomous groups. However, more broadly, it raises interesting questions about when the exclusion of others — generally a negative stance from the liberal perspective — is morally justified.
What’s Included in Inclusion?
On the surface, inclusion seems universally preferable to exclusion. Who likes to be excluded? Studies have shown that being excluded harms one’s mental and physical health, as well as financial wellbeing. The concept of inclusion, or inclusiveness, conjures images of a society populated by diverse members, all respectfully engaging with, and supporting one another. Exclusion, on the other hand — as the recent George Floyd protests have reminded us — is associated with discrimination, social stigmatization, income disparity, poor health and education outcomes.
From a social justice perspective, inclusion should be the norm. Society is better when all its members are free and able to voice opinions, participate in democracy, and engage fully in society. Naturally, even in societies that grow more tolerant and inclusive, there will always be subgroups who enjoy greater privileges and power than others. That power may translate into normalizing the values, preferences, and cultural practices of the privileged at the expense of the marginalized. Because that normalization can have lasting and dramatic consequences on all others, there are circumstances in which ensuring marginalized groups have the ability to self-determine the limits of their inclusion and exclusion from broader society is to the benefit of all.
When talking about inclusion and exclusion in the social sphere it is important to note that the terms are context specific. For example, both geographic and temporal conditions have defined the who, how, when, and why people are in or out. The term social inclusion, coined by René Lenoir in 1974, originally referred to those on the margins of society — the physically and mentally disabled, the socially maladjusted, and the poor.
As sociology became a larger factor in policy analysis, other institutions found the term more useful than general anti-poverty language: In the 1990’s, social insurance was seen as a means of achieving social inclusion in the EU. Across the Atlantic Ocean, US policymakers used the term to frame discussions about wealth disparity. For programs and policymakers today, social inclusion is used to discuss the manner and opportunity by which marginalized and disadvantaged groups are able to meaningfully interact and take part in society. As students of inclusion and exclusion expand the concepts beyond just economic conditions, measures of social inclusion have come to incorporate access to services (utilities, health, education) and more abstract considerations like cultural, physical, and political participation.
There are programs and policies today that are working towards a more inclusive society. The UN has dedicated task forces committed to achieving gender parity, international protections for ethnic minorities and refugees, increased political participation of disenfranchised groups, and many other boundaries of exclusion. Outside of formal institutions, many donor groups and activist organizations bring attention to disparities between privileged and excluded populations and seek to rectify them.
However, without requisite ethnographic considerations, programs and policies can be unintentionally pernicious. Even more troubling, in some instances programs which claim to foster social inclusion may actually mask sinister and insidious agendas.
A Question of Jurisdiction
On the surface, McGirt v. Oklahoma was a question of jurisdictional politics. Jimcy McGirt, a member of the Seminole Nation, was arrested, tried, and found guilty on several charges of sexual assault by the Oklahoma government. Citing the specific language of the Major Crimes Act, which dealt with jurisdiction over crimes committed on reservations, McGirt argued post-conviction that both his Native status, as well as the location of crimes, should have prevented the Oklahoma state government from trying his case. His guilt wasn’t a question for the Supreme Court to decide, but rather which criminal system was responsible for finding him guilty in the first place — Oklahoma’s or the federal government’s. Ultimately, for the Supreme Court to rule on which institution held jurisdictional power, the court needed to resolve a long-standing question of the legitimacy of Muscogee (Creek) Nation treaties with Congress.
As noted by both Gorsuch in his majority opinion and by lawyers for the state of Oklahoma, there has been a long history of attempts by the federal government to diminish both the size and nature of the Muscogee reservation. In fact, lawyers for Oklahoma went as far as to argue that since the state and federal government have rarely, if ever, acknowledged or honored the treaties and negotiations with the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, those agreements shouldn’t be enforced. The language of that argument sets the tone for a conversation about forced inclusion and benevolent exclusion — how useful or beneficial is inclusion when it comes about because of betrayal by dominant in-groups?
Treaties in America
While the original 1830 treaty between Congress and the Muscogee Nation defined the size of the reserved land and guaranteed the tribe ownership in perpetuity, by 1866 Congress had already drafted an updated treaty which forcibly purchased Muscogee protected land for cents on the dollar. In the 1880’s, a time period known as the “allotment era,” the Muscogee, like other tribes, suffered from the Dawes Act and other legislation which sought to weaken tribal sovereignty and foster a “class of assimilated, landowning agrarian Native Americans” by requiring reservation land to be divided among members instead of being owned by the community at large. As requirements for ownership relaxed, much of the parceled land on Muscogee land found its way into non-native hands and what land remained for tribal groups was linked to requirements for assimilation. Land ownership was often contingent on speaking English and refusing to engage in traditional practices.
As treaties, boundaries, the establishment of reservations and politicking mitigated actual bloodshed between the United States Army and tribal groups, Native populations found themselves facing a new threat from a modernizing and spreading Euro-American society — “death by red tape.”This had enormous repercussions: nomadic groups, newly bound to specific land, lost a sense of heritage and mobility, agricultural groups had to change both the manner and type of food grown, traditional medicinal practices had to be updated to account for changes in flora availability, and conflict between newly relocated tribes and existing ones destabilized conditions in the West which led to bloodshed and conflict. As settlers moved past the Mississippi, Native Americans faced further challenges as Euro-American society switched between extreme manners of inclusion and exclusion.
The violation of established borders and boundaries, either by new settler populations or abrogation by Congress in the interest of those settlers, cut out agriculturally and economically beneficial land from Native groups, creating a forced dependence on American institutions and societies for resources, while further eroding already threatened cultural practices.
The growing Euro-American settler group supplanted a diverse set of values regarding gender, property, discipline, etc., with the values that they saw as successful, i.e. their own — private property, self-directed occupations, divisions between women and men. Even those settlers acting in good faith “generally believed the only acceptable future was full assimilation into Anglo-American society as sedentary agriculturalists and Christians.” For these settlers, measures of prosperity and success were predicated on practices and traditions often in conflict with existing Native cultures, and attempts at assimilation and forced inclusion inherently meant turmoil and tension.
At the federal level, assimilation was attempted through legislation. For Native Americans living in Euro-American cities, the Indian Offenses Act punished manifestations of tribal culture, like clothing and hairstyles, the open practice of religion, and other traditional customs.
While Native populations saw their culture and practices challenged through compromising and forced interaction with Euro-American societies, many among the newer generations were denied the opportunity to experience that culture in the first place. Native children were taken, in some cases voluntarily, but often through coercion or kidnapping, to brutal assimilating schools with curricula built around Euro-American values and practices. The intent of these schools was to, in effect, “Kill the Indian and save the Man”. Children had their hair cut, were taught the norms and customs of Euro-American society, were denied access to families for years, and many died from disease, abuse, and neglect. Upon returning home, an entire generation of Native Americans found themselves socially displaced. The Euro-American society which had forcibly assimilated these children did not truly accept them as equals, and assimilated children often found little refuge and comfort in returning to the communities from which they were pulled.
Indigenous sovereignty was destroyed intentionally and intergenerationally in the interest of a homogenized society. In fact, many of the difficulties facing tribal communities today can be directly attributed to the forced social inclusion programs of the 19th and 20th century.
Benevolent Exclusion?
In the face of that history of neglect and reneging on treaty terms (or in many cases Congress never ratifying treaties that were agreed), the Court, in deciding McGirt v. Oklahoma did something that many find remarkable — it compelled the United States government to honor its promises and enforce agreements made to tribal groups in the 19th-century. In effect, the decision instantly excluded the Muscogee (Creek) Nation from the influence of Oklahoma authority and restored some sovereign power. The decision did not confer absolute autonomy to the Muscogee Nation, as tribal spokesmen are reassuring citizens of eastern Oklahoma and critics of the decision, but it was a promising step in correcting a tragic, dehumanizing, and often deadly legacy of the United States flip-flopping on the inclusion or exclusion of Native Americans.
The history of Native American interaction with the United States government is an example of how social exclusion can be benevolent. That is, a threatened, minority group can draw a boundary around itself to keep a threatening majority group out. The creeping and pervasive influence of Euro-American values, lifestyles, and culture both by intentionally malicious actors and passive forces has been devastating for tribes (even today, the increased urban mobilization of Native populations and consumption of Euro-American media is threatening cultural practices and language stability). But when excluded groups get to decide the terms of their inclusion and the limits of outside influences, there can be positive outcomes.
*Noah Truesdale, currently studying for a Master’s degree in political scienceat NYU, is a research intern with Nils Junge Consulting
This blog post proposes — based on my experience in international development — the key qualities of a good colleague or team member.
People come in packages made up a vast set of qualities, attributes, skills, quirks, and what have you. The seven I present here for your consideration just seem like the essential ones to me. Quite possibly, a few will apply outside the international development field as well.
Twenty years looking back
It’s now been 20 years since I began working in this field. (Back then, when looking ahead, 20 years seemed like an almost endless expanse of time; looking back, the period seems oddly brief. Anyway…) In May 2000 I arrived in Albania for an internship that turned into my first consultant job. I hit the ground running, unleashed after an unsatisfying career stretch alternating, sometimes daily, between a dead-end finance job and pursuit of a pie-in-the-sky acting career in New York City. Enrolling in a Master’s degree program in international relations was, finally, the pivot that launched what would become a far more rewarding career.
Two decades, several dozen countries, and thousands of professional relationships later, I can say that I fully subscribe to the following received wisdom: it’s the people who make or break programs and projects.
Fair enough, you say, but what kind of people? What sort of qualities do well-rounded professionals, the kind of people you want to work with and for, embody? And…what sort of qualities will make other people want to work with me?
Seven key attributes
1) Professionalism. I use this as a catch-all term to encompass the range of behaviors considered “normal” in the work sphere, from reliability and trustworthiness to responsiveness and collegiality. There are many unwritten codes of conduct but it isn’t necessarily difficult to act in a professional way. Observing more seasoned colleagues is not a bad place to start. Nonetheless, I’m still surprised how some people fail to follow up with a “thank you” after an interview, or fail to respond to an email request. If you’re too busy, a simple one-line response along the lines of “I wish I could help, but I’m tied up with other work at the moment,” would not seem a lot to ask. Beyond the work itself, acting in a professional manner has implications simply for maintaining good relationships.
2) Management ability. This ability is useful for everyone, even those not in charge of teams or departments. I refer to management in the broadest sense — using the available resources, or finding additional ones, to achieve a goal. You may not be in charge of other people if you are, say, a junior staffer or work independently, outside an organization. However, even then, if you can’t manage tasks, or your time and work relationships, you are inviting unnecessary agony into your life. Plan and prioritize what needs doing, in whatever way that makes sense to you. Plenty of people still keep handwritten daily and weekly “to do” lists. I get much satisfaction out of crossing off tasks as they get done. Managing relationships may be more of an art than a science, but it is a skill no less important for all that.
3) Technical skills. These are the specialized skills for which we are usually hired: e.g. setting up a health clinic, running data analysis software, analyzing electricity tariff structures, conducting cost-benefit analysis, and so on. Such skills are developed through a combination of education, book learning and experience. With some adjustments, they can be transferable. Knowing how a state-owned water utility operates helps in understanding how a state-owned electric utility works. Early in my career, I conducted a fair amount of socio-economic analyses of World Bank-financed projects. That stood me in good stead when I later expanded to USAID project evaluations.
4) Critical thinking. We can also call this common sense. I include here abilities such as seeing the big picture, connecting the dots, asking the right questions, applying logic to a problem, seeing things in a new or useful way. Data analysis software is hugely important and has greatly facilitated our ability to analyze vast amounts of information. However, even in the context of artificial intelligence and machine learning, the performance of the human mind remains formidable. It has been estimated that our brains can process anywhere from 10 to 100 terabytes of information. While supercomputers now have faster processing speeds and storage capacity, the human brain is vastly more efficient. And humans can think and imagine, while computers can still only retrieve information and run algorithms. We probably still have a few decades before we’re overtaken by machines. Use the time to your advantage.
5) Writing. Not very distant from — and rather dependent on — critical thinking, is writing ability. Your colleagues and managers will be very grateful for your clear, succinct, and grammatically correct prose. This applies both at a structural level and at the level of sentences and even words. The gold standard in the English-speaking world, at least, is clarity: you should be able to explain things in a way that your grandmother could understand. I once asked a World Bank manager what, for him, was the most important quality he looked for in a consultant. Without hesitation, he replied “good writing skills.” Once you’ve finished the job, the documents you produced may often be the only tangible thing attributable to your efforts. If they are made publicly available, they will last and may influence the work of others.
6) Experience. Essentially, this is the ability to apply the past to the present, and to place the current situation, its problems and opportunities, within a broader context. By definition, experience takes time to build. However, that doesn’t mean every person with 20 years under their belt has the same amount of sagesse. Not all experience has the same value. The more work you do in a given time period, the more experience you will collect. That’s basic math. The more attentive you are, the more you will learn as you’re doing it. If you mindlessly play a piece 100 times on the piano, you probably won’t memorize it. If you practice with intent, however, you will learn it by heart even while playing it less. Diversity of experience, across countries, clients and sectors is key. As the author Stephen Covey pointed out, “Some people say they have twenty years, when in reality, they only have one year’s experience, repeated twenty times.”
7) Energy and enthusiasm. None of the above counts for much if your work makes you tired, cynical or lazy. This the ace that young people have up their sleeve, to compensate for their lack of experience. The term “passion” is often used in this context, but I admit being lukewarm on the concept. In my experience, the people who bring too much passion to their work tend to be less than emotionally stable. You can’t sustain passion forever, and so it’s not something that can be counted on. Or, the passionate types are also ruthlessly ambitious, elbowing their way up through the hierarchy. Generally, colleagues or counterparts that run on passion are hard to be around. (Save your passion for the bedroom or the ballpark.) However, energy and enthusiasm channeled toward a project are very welcome traits in colleagues. They can be infectious, and even enhance the quality of everyone else’s work. They also go a long way toward compensating for weaknesses in other areas. The trick is staying motivated. Having a clear, overarching goal – which could be as simple as “I want to produce the best report on this topic that’s ever been seen” – doesn’t hurt.
Some reflections on the above
There are, of course, other supremely useful attributes, e.g. leadership ability, diplomatic nous, negotiation skills, foreign languages, and sheer grit. They make individuals stand out in the crowd and open all kinds of doors. They are not absolutely essential however. You can have a satisfying and productive career without them.
If you are the type of person who has a yen for self-improvement (which, since you’re reading this blog post, I’m guessing you might) you can do a little exercise: rate yourself along the above attributes, say, on a scale of 1 to 5.
If you feel particularly deficient in one area, various strategies can be pursued. One is to diligently work on the areas you are weakest. That could entail reading, taking training, talking to people, as well as just being mindful. Another is to overcompensate, in a positive sense – aim to become brilliant and exceptional at one or maximum two things. A lot of senior experts, for example, may be bona fide curmudgeons, but they are valued — and tolerated! — because of their vast technical knowledge and experience.
Very few people will score top marks across all attributes. The good thing is it that no one is expected to, either. That’s why most work is done by teams, not individuals. Even a book with a single author is almost always a team effort. Just take a look at the acknowledgements section to remind yourself of this. It’s not a bad policy to be honest with people about what you can and cannot do.
A corollary of the above is that the stronger you are in one area, the more tolerance others will have for your weaknesses in other areas.
Keep in mind that these attributes are relative, depending on the circumstance and who else is in the room. On one project, for example, your 15 years may make you the most experienced person on the team, whereas on another, they may pale in comparison to your senior colleague’s 30 years.
Concluding thoughts
Every now and then I find myself working with someone who seems quite brilliant in all of the above attributes, and the question arises — is this person for real? Almost always, however, after getting to know them better, their weaknesses emerge and they turn out to be human after all… The weaknesses weren’t visible at first, or were not that irksome. That’s a skill too, of course, being able to conceal one’s faults.
It’s pretty difficult to be both human and perfect. And that’s okay. Not worth the effort, really. It’s good to remember that robots and AI come with plenty of built in flaws, glitches and annoyances, too (and that includes ridiculously macro-heavy MS Word and its I-know-better-than-you-what-formatting-should-be-used-here-but–maybe-I’ll-change-the-font-and-spacing-halfway-through-the-document attitude, pervasive flaws which Microsoft has not bothered to fix for over a decade).
Finally, possessing the seven attributes I’ve described here is not just good for sake of doing exemplary work. It will also make people want to collaborate with you again.
I was one of those kids obsessed with counting stuff.
I collected business cards, and kept a running daily tally, stopping only when I reached 10,000, and after a friend of the family asked me why I was wasting my time on that when I could be learning a new language. I timed how long it took me to walk home from the subway stop in Toronto where we lived, logging my times in a notebook and getting a strange satisfaction out of beating my previous record by 15 seconds. I counted all books in the Hardy Boys series I avidly consumed. In fact, in high school, I began keeping a list of every book I read, a habit that continues 35 years later.
Starting in eighth grade, I began tracking my own modest earnings and expenses. Perhaps an early sign of fastidiousness that I periodically worked to overcome via reckless teenage stunts. (but our family still keeps a budget). In my twenties, my focus shifted to beating my personal best marathon time. I mostly didn’t set specific targets for myself. It was more about watching the numbers grow, or shrink, as the case may be. The intrinsic awards were enough. They pushed me to do better.
All that is fine and good. It is a truism that numbers affect our priorities and our actions. The standard way to judge success is by setting targets and measuring achievements.
Targets can be internal – a New Year’s resolution to lose 20 pounds next year, or do 40 squats per day. The proliferation of fitness apps that track how many steps you take every day, how many hours you sleep at night, and other metabolic processes – although of dubious reliability – are all the rage. All of these things drive behavior, in relatively benign ways.
Targets can also be external, of course, such as those set by a business, as in monthly sales targets or daily active users. In the development field, projects use results frameworks with a detailed breakdown of quantitative targets against which project goals are measured. These are all instances of using numerical targets to drive decisions.
Easily quantifiable targets are powerful motivators. Numbers are probably so compelling because they are, or at least seem, objective. They are mental shortcuts that are easy to “get.” They focus the mind, guide strategy, and help plan for the future.
Beware of the quantitative bias trap
What’s not to like about them? Well, quantitative targets, if not used carefully, and when not balanced by other goals, can lead to distorted outcomes. They can affect behavior in pernicious ways as well. The wrong incentives – divorced of context and isolated from other, less quantifiable goals – can have negative unintended consequences.
So it is that studies of the benefits of sleep tracking apps, that quantify hours of rest and create benchmarks in users minds (I have to get my eight hours in!) have found using them often worsens sleep quality. People become more anxious and stressed when the app shows they are not hitting their sleep target, even while the ability of these apps to correctly measure sleep has been called into question.
The observation that using numbers as targets has negative side effects has been made famous by the British economist Charles Goodhart. In what has become known as Goodhart’s Law, he states that “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Why is this so? One of thinking about it is that ways are found of hitting the target that hurt or distort other important goals. Other aspects of a plan or policy may get deprioritized, given less funding. Anything that doesn’t have a target on its back loses the appeal of the hunt, and risks falling by the wayside.
Campbell’s Law, named after the social psychologist and experimental evaluation pioneer Donald Campbell, is a variation of this: “the more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”
This is just not a management issue – it can have life and death consequences.
Back in 1993, Domino’s Pizza scrapped its 30 minutes or its free guarantee when it became clear the company was were putting drivers’ safety at risk (and after they lost a $79 million court judgment).
Which brings us to the current upheaval shaking the country and the world and the world: the bolt of awareness around racial injustice and police brutality sparked by the May 25 killing of George Floyd.
A recent Voxarticle on key police reforms in the wake of the Michael Brown killing in Ferguson, Missouri, reported that when the Justice Department investigated the Ferguson Police Department in response to the protests, it found that police “were encouraged to ticket as many people as possible with the explicit goal of raising as much revenue as possible from fines and fees. But to do this, police targeted the most vulnerable — mainly, black residents — with frivolous charges.”
While quotas of this type have been declared in some states, and departments won’t admit to using them, New York Police Department whistleblowers reported that, in order to meet their quotas, officers would often go after groups that have little political power.
This is one way that the numbers game turns ugly: targets and distorted power relations are a formula for disaster. A man with a gun – and a number in his head – versus a group without a voice.
It is unclear how much unwritten quotas, or the mere desire to get more “points,” drives police behavior. Maybe death is not the most common outcome, but it is not hard to see how this potent cocktail pricks at the wounds of racial injustice.
To put it plainly – when quantitative targets are the sole priority, qualitative aspects such as, well, dignity, freedom, and safety, to name a few, get undermined. These are unintended consequences, which make life a little worse, in the best case scenario. However, as we have seen, they also have potential strengthen systems of inequality and oppression, leading to the death of at least some.
Numbers matter. They drive us toward goals. I was a young counting aficionado and it did me little harm and maybe some good. But equally important are putting guardrails in place so that we don’t let numbers blind us, or others, to what actually matters.
