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.
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
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.
Not only is the coronavirus assaulting our bodies, killing thousands, which is bad enough. It is also attacking our social and economic structures.
Scientists have found that once it enters the body, COVID-19 is capable of attacking almost any organ, with devastating consequences. It is doing something very similar to our economic systems.
Your money or your life
During the spring and summer of 2020, in the depths of the coronavirus crisis, human contact has become potentially life-threatening. Going to church, concerts, restaurants, ball games, just hanging out with friends…all the things that bring us together became potentially lethal, and were ordered to shut down. The slow pace of reopening and the hesitant return to normal life in many places highlights the ongoing fears people have of becoming infected.
The coronavirus has led to many needless deaths, in the sense that researchers have estimated locking down earlier could have saved tens of thousands of lives, notably in the US, UK, Brazil, Russia and other countries. In many countries, either by going into lockdown too late, or opening up too early, the health of the economy seems to have been given precedence over the health of the population.
Is there an inherent de-prioritizing of human life in some societies? If we consider just the US, the answer would seem to be yes. Add up the opioid deaths (67,000 in 2018) fatal shootings (over 15,000 in 2018), civilians killed by police (about 1,000 per year) not to mention falling life expectancy (a phenomenon unique among developed countries), one cannot but wonder whey so little has been done to address these types of deaths.
The disregard toward human life was not new, but has come into sharp relief during the crisis, which has so far claimed over 115,00 American lives (out of at least 420,000 worldwide).
Calculating risks
Of course, it is true that a balance must be struck between staying safe and living life. To quote Jean-Paul Sartre “to know what life is worth you have to risk it once in a while.”
There is a risk calculus to everything we do. We’re always making trade-offs. Shut economies down too tightly and for too long and the side-effects can start turning lethal. Clearly, the health of the economy indirectly affects our personal health as well. People avoid going to the hospital, women in abusive relationships are further endangered, the poor run out of food.
However, in some countries, as the crisis dragged on it became clear that leaders, keeping an eye on the election cycle and the stock market, have been cavalier about the human costs. The default justifications for doing too little were either professed beliefs that COVID-19 is not that serious, perhaps even a hoax? Or that people’s freedom should not be curtailed.
What does the coronavirus threat mean for society? Specifically, what does it mean for the capitalist system, to which most of the world’s countries adhere to one degree or another? One could argue that, amid the economic havoc it has caused, and the many needless deaths, the virus also presents us with an opportunity. An opportunity to shift our focus away from materialism, consumerism, profits and share prices, and place greater value on human aspects.
I will argue that this would not be wide-eyed, new age attitude, but a smart investment in one of the under-appreciated pillars of capitalism – human capital. And it is precisely human capital that the coronavirus is attacking.
Capitalism’s foundations
According to economic theory, capitalism is based on three factors: capital, labor and land. The first two, capital and labor, have been severely damaged by coronavirus.
With labor, the impact is obvious. Millions have lost their jobs and a large share of those jobs will never come back. Many businesses have shut their doors forever, others are having to adjust to diminished sales as customer numbers fall. Still more are rebalancing how they combine labor and technology and accelerating the move to automation.
What about capital? In economic terms capital is an asset, a good. Traditionally, capital is considered the physical and financial material necessary for producing goods and creating wealth. Capital is the raw material to be transformed into things we use and things we consume. This process of capital extraction and transformation produces new value.
In simple terms, labor and technology are the skills, energy and tools used to create surplus value from that capital. We take a basically inert substance, matter, and process it into something useful and more valuable than before.
Mix in property rights and freedom of exchange, and in very broad terms you have the basic building blocks of a capitalist system.
Human capital
In the 1950s the concept of capital was expanded beyond the physical and financial to what was called human capital. This refers to the health, education, and social networks of a population. This capital is not visible, per se, but it is a very valuable asset. Simply put, being educated, healthy and connected with others helps all of us to live better lives.
Human capital also increases productivity, it makes the labor input more efficient and effective. Without human capital, physical and financial capital are not very useful, although technology is able to substitute for human capital for certain tasks, as production processes become automated.
Another type of capital is social capital. This is formed out of the contacts which individuals have with others, their networks. These can also be extremely valuable. The Kyrgyz have a saying (which was used for the title of a World Bank study on the importance of social networks in that country): better a hundred friends than a hundred rubles.
COVID’s attack on capital
It is precisely the three core elements of human capital — health, education, and social networks — which COVID-19 has so successfully attacked.
In terms of health, it has infected over 6 million people, and killed over 400,000 as of early June 2020. On the education front, the virus has hobbled our schools, weakened the ability of children and university students to learn. And when it comes to networks — the confinement, social isolation, and closure of restaurants, bars and churches has severely restricted our human contact. And for the roughly 50% of the global population that is without internet access or smartphones, it has degraded their social interactions. Not everyone spends their days in Zoom meetings or happy hours.
Of course, even before the crisis, it seems our society gave greater weight to financial capital than to the health or education of our population. One could argue that police killings of unarmed African Americans, and the apparent disregard among police for human rights that have become apparent during the protests are yet another indicator that in America the interests of society take second place to other interests. (On could say that “black” human capital is valued less than “white” human capital.)
After the 2008 financial crisis, government bailed out the banks, not ordinary people. The numbers that we track are financial — the Dow Jones, GDP, interest rates.
Why don’t we take as much care of our human capital as we do of our financial capital? Somehow, we’ve let ourselves, as a society, become focused on efficiencies, cost savings, share prices and shareholder value. It has come to seem normal to many people.
Just referring to the US healthcare system and the health of the population as an example — are people truly free if they face the threat of catastrophic health bills should they become sick? Is it good for capitalism when labor is hobbled in this way?
Undervaluing human health and education
Human capital is intangible. Is it because economists have trouble measuring it, that we undervalue it? (For example, it is fairly easy to track years of schooling, it is more difficult to measure the quality of education, i.e. how much children are actually learning.) Is it because financial and business interests largely control our political processes? A combination of the above?
Why, for example, does health insurance have to be linked to be employment, as is the case in the US? Why do we in the US, have a system where millions still don’t have health insurance when all other rich countries do? A lot of people are afraid to leave their jobs because they depend on them for health insurance. That can hardly be called freedom of movement, an essential element of a free market system which the US prides itself on having. It is not optimal for the free market. Staying in a job you’d rather leave doesn’t stimulate risk-taking and innovation, two prized elements of the free market system.
It is not that we can’t afford it — the US spends more money on healthcare per capita than any country in the world. It just does not spend it very well. Life expectancy is lower than all other rich nations and, as noted above, has been falling for four years (it finally ticked up again in 2019).
Opposition to guaranteeing health cannot stem from some love for unfettered free markets, or an aversion to government support. Medicare is huge and popular! And we are happy to bail out financial institutions, businesses, car companies, when they were on the brink of collapse in 2009. We always seem happy to lavish support on the private sector in the form of tax cuts and tax breaks.
Now, it’s true that trillions of dollars in stimulus funding have been passed on to citizens. But this is a reaction to the crisis. Why should we not take better care of human capital during the good times as well?
An opportunity to change?
Let’s hope that the assault on human capital by COVID-19 will lead to a shift in values. A shift away from fixating on financial capital toward human capital.
What I would hope arises from this is a different way of thinking, a more human-centric attitude toward capitalism.
Under such a human-centric capital system, as much weight would be given to human capital as it is to physical and financial capital. This may seem an obvious choice to many liberals. However, the shift will only take place if the die-hard free market, pro-business factions come to recognize it as well: that human capital — a healthy, educated population — is valuable, should be cared for and protected. Just like a company’s bottom line. That would be a kind of victory, and a metric worth tracking.
It is the middle of April 2020. Restaurants around the world stand empty.
In the U.S. we are entering the second month of Covid-19 restrictions on movement, business and social activities. As with most of the world, virtually the entire country is under some form of ‘stay at home’ order or lockdown.
Turbulence and uncertainty
The coronavirus pandemic has created huge uncertainties, including: how the easily the virus is transmitted, why some are infected and others aren’t, why some but not others succumb, when the combined health-economic crisis will be over, how bad the damage to the economy will be, and when will it recover.
The fear and uncertainty have been tracked by the stock market, which has exhibited violent swings. March 2020 was the most turbulent month of the stock market in the 124-year history of the Dow Jones Industrials, as measured by daily falls and rises.
While virtually everyone has been affected by the crisis, it would be an overstatement to say that “we’re all in this together.” Amid all the uncertainty, one thing is certain: the poor and vulnerable are going to suffer the most.
Those of us who still have jobs — especially jobs that don’t require us to leave the home — are the lucky ones. We can still count on an income (for now, anyway.) As businesses shutter, jobs have become a scarcer commodity and almost overnight, millions have suddenly lost their main source of livelihood. Since the middle of March, 10 percent of Americans have lost their jobs.
Unprecedented use of the term “unprecedented”
On the economic front, the present pandemic has begun eliciting comparisons not with the global financial crisis of 2008, but with the decade-long Great Depression that afflicted the nation starting in 1929. Policy makers and citizens alike are hoping for a quick recovery.
In the meantime, a shocking number of people face a grim reality as they have been pushed to the unemployment front line. In the three weeks ending on April 9, 16 million people claimed unemployment benefits. The unemployment rate has spiked to an estimated 13 percent, the highest since the Great Depression.
A Pew Research Center survey taken at the end of March found that nearly nine of out 10 Americans said their lives had changed a little and 44% said their lives had changed in a major way as a result of the coronavirus crisis.
These, and many other, massive changes did not gradually set in; they occurred in a matter of weeks.
The people most affected, of course, are those who have succumbed to the virus, and those in hospitals. Then there are the millions of doctors, nurses, EMT workers and thers in the healthcare sector, working on the front lines and putting their lives at risk. These new heroes are the most highly exposed to the dangers of the pandemic.
Unpleasant choices
However, on a structural level, the blow has landed hardest on low-income workers (as usual) and informal workers. Millions of people have lost their jobs in sectors that are collapsing, such as hospitality, retail, travel, manufacturing, house cleaning, childcare, or in sectors which are considered essential businesses and services, where continuing to work means more chances of exposure.
In some of these sectors — groceries, warehouses, delivery services — demand has even surged, and hundreds of thousands of jobs are being created. This is hardly a cause for jubilation, however, because simply leaving your home to go to a workplace puts you at greater risk. The low-paid employees at nursing homes, and in social care, cleaning, etc. naturally are also rewarded with a higher chance of infection.
Those who are low-paid do not have the relative luxury of white-collar workers to stay at home and work remotely. If they quit their jobs, they lose a paycheck. If they stick with it, they may be putting their lives and those of their loved ones at risk. A grim choice, to say the least.
For those in sectors that have just cratered, their source of livelihood has evaporated and it is uncertain for how long, or whether, those jobs will come back. Predictions are that many restaurants and other businesses will close permanently, which does not bode well for the economic recovery after restrictions are lifted and life goes back to normal, or a “new normal,” whatever that will look like.
While the government is spending trillions of dollars to cushion the blow, people working in informal jobs, including undocumented migrants, will not qualify for government assistance. Even the $1,200 in government relief going to the rest is not nearly enough to make up for lost employment.
And so, millions are cast out to sea in a leaky vessel, heading toward the twin catastrophe of Scylla and Charybdis. These are the people who will struggle to survive using the safety nets or their own meagre (and often non-existent) savings to carry them through. They also have fewer resources— such as savings and other assets — to fall back on during hard times.
The global shock
Low-paid, poor households are considered “vulnerable” during normal times. Vulnerable to what? Well, to the catastrophic situation we are in now. This “shock,” a term used by economists to refer to a sudden disruption with negative consequences, is probably already pushing many vulnerable into destitution.
Normally, shocks hit people at an individual level, or because a sector has been hit. Individual shocks might come in the form of an illness or injury, or death of a family breadwinner, which dry up an income stream. Sector level shocks affect an entire industry, such as the shutting down of the coal industry in England under Thatcher’s reforms, or of the textile industry in Nigeria when the country began allowing cheaper imports from China. Shocks also occasionally hit an entire nation, such as Hurricane Maria which devastated Domenica and Puerto Rico in in 2017. But this time, the shock is global, all-encompassing and, yes, unprecedented.
For individual workers, compounding the risks that come with working outside the home are the risks of simply getting to work. Many low-paid workers rely on public or shared transportation. Obviously it is more difficult to practice social distancing in confined spaces, such as subways or buses.
Circumstances are tough enough for the vulnerable who are still healthy. But for those who become ill, the situation gets much worse. Getting sick while just getting by imposes a cost not only to people’s immediate physical health, but is a tax on livelihoods and the wellbeing of dependents.
In the U.S., as in many developing countries, there are three specific areas where the poor slip through holes in social safety nets: paid sick leave, health insurance, and unemployment benefits. Combined, these big holes in the net can, perversely, incentivize people to risk their own wellbeing —and now, in the age of Covid-19, their own lives and those of others.
Lack of paid sick leave
The lack of paid sick leave doesn’t just harm individuals, it threatens the public welfare. According to the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP), which highlighted this issue in November 2019 (well before the pandemic hit these shores), over 32 million workers in the U.S. have no paid sick days off, with low wage workers being the least likely to have sick leave. The combination of no of sick leave and low income incentivizes behaviors that run against measures needed to mitigate the risks thrown up by the pandemic. Covid-19 can thus “cost them their livelihoods, as well as their health”.
Without paid sick leave, workers cannot afford to take unpaid time off when they are sick. That means they will continue to work, while exposing others to their illness, with potentially deadly implications. In other words, individual choices, resulting from public policies, end up harming the public good, even as it widens inequality.
Lack of health insurance
In the U.S., many of those same workers who do not have paid sick leave also lack health insurance.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, the number of uninsured Americans fell significantly —from 46.5 million to 27 million — between the time the Affordable Healthcare Act was passed in 2010, and 2016, Obama’s last year in office. Since then, the number of uninsured Americans has been creeping up again. From 2017 to 2018 it increased by 500,000, according to Tolbert et al (2019).
Unexpected healthcare costs threaten to burden already limited household finances. They disincentivize seeking treatment or preventive care. Though some governments provide free or reduced-cost services to its poorest, the coronavirus may now present an additional expense for those ineligible, or who cannot access it.
Lack of unemployment benefits
For the many who work in the informal sector, or as gig workers — think Uber and Lyft drivers — there are no unemployment benefits.
Although governments in some countries are making an effort to support those who have lost their jobs as a result of the pandemic, if you don’t have a contract, you can’t be laid off, and you can’t claim benefits. You just watch your income shrink or disappear.
Safety nets under strain
Meanwhile, NBC News reports that nonprofit community centers, who primarily serve as safety nets for un- and underinsured American citizens and immigrants, are running out of funding as the coronavirus ramps up. Not surprisingly, the poorest are suffering the most, as this USA Today article points out. A drop in donations, volunteers, supplies, and certainty of funding, combined with overall lack of preparedness, is forcing these clinics to reduce their services.
Compounding poverty
Similar to the way in which investors reap compound interest, money begets more money in an upward spiral of wealth accumulation, so does poverty beget more poverty in a downward spiral asset depletion.
Thus, other poverty factors and demographics can compound the economic and health impact of the coronavirus on the poor. For example, the poor tend to live in smaller homes, more cramped environments (think of urban slums and shantytowns) and in larger families. This makes social distancing more difficult, and isolating the sick next to impossible.
Even if more vulnerable and elderly family members are staying home and practicing social distancing, someone who works, not by choice but by necessity — may bring the virus home with them.
Being poor is bad enough, but the coronavirus, and especially the government measures taken to combat and contain it – shutting down businesses, ordering people stay at home — hurt the poor much more than anyone else.
I’ve focused on the situation in the US above. With its weak support for the poor, the US, despite being a rich country, has quite a bit in common with developing countries. A big difference is that the US is home to the world’s global currency. It can print as many dollars as it needs to bail itself out (although a move not entirely devoid of fiscal consequences).
A far-off consolation?
Plagues and pandemics sometimes reorder societies. It may be a meager consolation, but sometimes the reordering benefits the lower classes, leveling the playing field. After the Black Death swept through Europe in the 14th century, killing between 30 and 60 percent of its population, demand for labor jumped, serfs were freed from their masters, and wages increased.
For those who have been alarmed by the relentless rise in inequality in rich countries, the pandemic may be a blessing in disguise, although for many of the poor living through this crisis now it will be too little too late.
Life was simple. I had planned to devote this blog to
helping organizations set up monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems.
Then global events overtook me. And all of us.
With the coronavirus, the invisible Covid-19, we have woken
up to find ourselves in a not-so-brave new world. Socializing is over —
social distancing is in. As our economic, social, and cultural lives are shut down
by the health scare and accompanying protocols, it seems almost impossible to
have a conversation in which the virus doesn’t intrude. It is equally rare to
read news, or any article, that isn’t about the topic in one way or another.
And I find it impossible to go back to my rough draft on M&E systems. The
new coronavirus reality has occupied our minds.
Unlike anything in living memory, this invisible, odorless
and often symptom-free virus has abruptly changed our world, affecting nearly
everyone. Perhaps remote Amazon communities and young infants are the only humans
on the planet still unaware, as country after country shuts down all public
life and economies are pushed to the brink of collapse.
We now live in a world of isolation and uncertainty —
over our personal health and economic well-being. This uncertainty is fueled by
the fact that for the first time in over a century we are experiencing a
pandemic of this scope. Many of us have gone, in a matter of weeks, from fixating
over the costs to humanity of climate change, (a medium-to-long-term
civilizational threat) to the costs of coronavirus, which are immediate and
life threatening in a very personal way. (Ironically, the global coronavirus shutdown
seems to be the best thing that has happened for emissions reductions in
decades, although don’t count on the effect lasting after the social distancing
era ends.)
Covid-19, this shrouded, faceless phantom with a scythe, silently stalking the globe, has triggered massive, rapid policy changes and behavioral changes, each with economic consequences. Last week, 3.3 million Americans filed unemployment claims. Whole sectors — travel, hospitality, dining, entertaining — are on their knees and it is far from clear how many will rise again from the rubble.
Who knows how bad it will be, or what world we will re-emerge into? After countless deaths, will humanity emerge healthier, having survived, and become inoculated against the virus, or will it be more vulnerable? Will we socialize less, now that we have grown accustomed to virtual meetings, or socialize more, because we’ll have been starved of real human contact? Whoever reads this blog years from now will know the answer. I don’t.
Notable from an M&E perspective is our ability to track the number of cases — infected, recovered, deceased —in real time across the globe, as illustrated by this Johns Hopkins University dashboard. I will venture to say there has been nothing else like it in the history of monitoring, where everyone with access to the internet (several billion people, now) can follow a global phenomenon as it unfolds, with almost hourly updates. This not the Olympics (now postponed), but a deadly kind of score-keeping, nonetheless.
Of course, the numbers we see in many countries must be taken with a grain of salt — would anyone like to hazard a guess about why Russia (population 146 million) is reporting fewer cases than Luxembourg (population 602,000)?
Aside from nature of a country’s political regime, the amount of testing seems to be correlated with the number of cases — the more tests that are carried out, the more that infections are found. Much more accurate data on infections and mortality rates would require testing a large, randomly selected sample of the population in each country.
At present, those who get tested are only those who think they have symptoms, or who are able to get tested. Many are infected and don’t know it. And there are some who would like to get tested but cannot, for reasons of access or lack of test kits or hospital resources.
So, the tracking is not a reflection of reality, but it is a near approximation, and we must use our own powers of reasoning to analyze their accuracy, what they numbers mean, and why they differ. Nonetheless, this sharing and publicizing of data is a remarkable phenomenon, with political implications.
Governments, when they finally decided to react, are passing policies and stimulus measures remarkably swiftly, with massive interventions in public life and in the economy, pumping in trillions of dollars to cushion the blow. This is not to say that the measures are always well designed, and the lack of coordination between countries is lamentable. But, from a policy perspective, it is quite astounding to see how quickly evidence and evaluation of an issue — chiefly by epidemiologists such as Neil Ferguson and colleagues at Imperial College, London — is taken seriously on board and turned into policy.
As a thought experiment, imagine if the world were tracking, on a daily basis, every death from malaria, every case of child mortality, every woman killed by her partner, every rise in greenhouse gas emissions, every time another person slips into poverty. Armed with this real time information, citizens would be busy educating themselves on the issues, how to prevent them, following the rise and fall of deaths, or emissions, in each country. Imagine if governments were spending billions and trillions of dollars to mitigate these problems and find solutions.
Of course, it is quite difficult to imagine such a thing. Why? Because the people affected are too few, relatively speaking, and they are too poor. The problems are too distant, geographically or temporally speaking, from those in power.
But we now have a pretty good idea of where the tipping
point is. That is, the point at which society and government suddenly become
willing to act. It occurs when the threat to people in middle and high-income
countries is immediate and potentially fatal. It is too early to know the mortality
rate for this pandemic, but it might lie between 1 and 2 percent, although using
the Johns Hopkins the range, is remarkably wide right now. At the time of
writing (March 27, 2020) among countries with at least 5,000 cases, mortality
is just 0.6 percent in Germany and 0.8 percent in Switzerland, but 7.6 percent
in Spain and an alarming 10.2 percent in Italy.
Coronavirus cases (countries with at least 5,00 cases)
Cases
Deaths
Mortality rate
Germany
47,373
285
0.6%
Austria
7,317
58
0.8%
South Korea
9,332
139
1.5%
United States
86,012
1,301
1.5%
Switzerland
12,311
207
1.7%
Belgium
7,284
289
4.0%
China
81,897
3,296
4.0%
United Kingdom
11,816
580
4.9%
France
29,581
1,698
5.7%
Netherlands
7,469
547
7.3%
Iran
32,332
2,378
7.4%
Spain
64,059
4,858
7.6%
Italy
80,589
8,215
10.2%
Source:
Own calculations, using data from Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus
Covid-19 Global Cases by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering
No one is quite sure as to why, although various theories
have been advanced, including access to and prevalence of testing (Germany is
doing better), demographic factors (South Korea has a younger population) and,
of course, government policy on social distancing.
For the historical record, at the time this blog is posted, there have been 585,040 confirmed Covid-19 infections and 26,455 deaths worldwide. (Between the time I drafted this post in the morning and publishing it this afternoon, the number of cases jumped by more than 35,000, and the number of deaths by over 1,500. That is how bad things are.) For those who are reading this in the future, however, the tally will be many millions of cases, and hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, of deaths.
This is not a joyful post to write. Hopefully, in the weeks and months to come there will, again, eventually, be positive news and issues to write about. For now, one can take some small comfort in knowing that M&E systems, if properly deployed, can be used to inform decisions for the common good. In the meantime, stay safe and keep well.
Is excluding other people ever acceptable? It is, in fact. There are plenty of circumstances where no one bats an eye at being excluded, where no one feels aggrieved.
Have you
ever been to a concert and felt aggrieved that you had to sit in the audience
while the musicians had the privilege of being on stage, receiving adulation
and getting paid for their work? Have you ever been to a football or baseball
game and felt it was deeply unfair that you were a spectator and had not been
allowed to play on the field? Did you feel it was unfair that they were getting
paid millions every year to play while you had to pay to get in? I’m
going to guess that the answer to the above questions, for most people, is
“no.”
On the other
hand, have you ever been excluded without understanding why? Perhaps you didn’t
get invited to a party, were rejected by a college, or failed to make the short-list
for a job.
More
pernicious, have you ever been excluded for reasons that seemed irrational and
unjust? It might have been on the basis of skin color, gender, beliefs or any
number of other seemingly arbitrary characteristics that help humanity divide
itself into tribes, leading to a good deal of enmity and grievance. For those
who espouse a liberal social order, at least, this is screaming social
injustice and a completely unacceptable form of exclusion.
The many
forms of exclusion
Obviously, exclusion comes in many forms. I will posit that “acceptable exclusion” occurs when those excluded basically accept the premise – that the rationale is clear, fair and the determination is arrived at transparently. Its opposite, unacceptable exclusion fails to meet those standards, and is generally referred to as social exclusion.
We recognize
and value the exclusiveness around sports and musical achievements, the basis
of which is, generally speaking, meritocracy.
We don’t want our sports teams to be recruited on the basis of, say,
skin color, or socio-economic background. We want selection of team members to
be based on skill. Sports are also segregated by gender, and this is generally
accepted as well. Genetic differences in strength between men and women create
what would be an unfair playing field if they were to compete against each
other.
There are
many forms of broadly acceptable exclusion. They relate to various criteria, as
the following selection of examples suggests:
skill — while sports and music are the most
obvious areas where exclusion is based on exclusivity, so are many jobs, since
applicants must meet certain qualifications. With jobs, however, there is a lot
more subjectivity around what is fair;
affordability — if you aren’t talented enough to
perform, you can still attend a sports event or concert, but most of the
time attendance is also exclusive, to the extent that people have to pay to
watch;
dress — fancy restaurants with dress codes
aim to maintain a sense of decorum and exclusivity, but even your average fast
food chain requires customers to wear a shirt and shoes;
age — adults are not allowed to attend
elementary school;
privacy — we lock our houses to keep strangers
out;
eligibility based on means — the poor who qualify for assistance.
Exclusion
and social norms
Social norms
determine what is acceptable and what isn’t. They are context specific. Differing
social norms means that some form of exclusion are widely acceptable (as per
the above examples), while other forms are not.
Social norms
change over time, of course. Up until
the 1960s, in much of the United States it was deemed acceptable, by parts of
the white citizenry, to exclude blacks from equal treatment, and they were
excluded from schools, restaurants, swimming pools, water fountains, bathrooms,
clubs, sports teams, and more.
Nowadays, in
the U.S. and in many liberally-oriented countries, it is not only unacceptable
but illegal to be excluded on the basis of race, religion, gender, sexual
orientation, etc. Preventing gay people from having the same right to marry as
heterosexuals was yet another form of exclusion. In 1988, only 12 percent of
Americans supported same-sex marriage; three decades later over two thirds did,
in the wake of its legalization.
This is not,
however, a happy story about how society at home or around the world is
becoming ever more inclusive. Here’s an extreme example of how exclusion
affects people. Recently, a young Iranian woman, Sahar Khodayari,
self-immolated after being sentenced to 24 years in prison for illegally
attending a football match. She tried to sneak in to see her favorite team, Esteghlal,
play, dressed as a man. The police discovered her true identity. Rather than go
to jail, she protested her sentence by lighting herself on fire in front of the
courthouse, bringing worldwide attention, and condemnation, to Iran’s policy of
only allowing males to attend football (American soccer) games.
Economic
exclusion
What about economic
exclusion, sometimes known as poverty? Is it acceptable to be deprived of basic
needs to live a dignified life? Is it fair? Here what is acceptable becomes tricky
and less clear.
One can
argue that in our capitalist society, it is acceptable insofar as ability to
pay for something is the price of access. If you can’t afford a nice house, a
car, or nice clothing, that’s seen as an individual thing. But when large
segments of society are not able to enjoy even basic services or standard
conveniences of modern life, things become complicated. In industrial societies
today, many young people struggle to afford decent housing or education. Many
low-income households struggle to eat nutritional food, even if they are not
deprived of calories. In general lacking access to the basics of life makes a
lot of other things harder — like buying a suit to go to attend a
job interview.
Exclusion
and the state
In response
to social pressure, governments often try to increase access to services — water, electricity, markets (via roads), or social payments.
People who deem they have been unfairly denied certain basic needs will take to
the streets. The Arab Spring is exhibit “A”. More recently, France was disrupted
by the gilets jaunes (“yellow vests), the French movement that erupted
in October 2018 in response to planned fuel tax hikes, and morphed into
protests for economic justice. A lot of people felt that the system was rigged
against them, that they were being kept out.
In the U.S.,
economic exclusion has become an ideological issue. To grossly oversimplify,
among conservatives, it has historically been considered an individual matter.
If you couldn’t climb up the economic ladder, pull yourself up by your bootstraps,
that was your fault. You weren’t working hard enough.
Liberals
mostly consider the system to be at fault. It isn’t fair that you were born
into poverty or suffered misfortune —
such as catastrophic
medical bills — and your station in life is not (just) about how hard you
studied or worked. The massive effort and money middle class parents spend on
ensuring their children get the best possible education and acquire the skills
is testament to the costs involved in succeeding in today’s society.
The more
that economic exclusion comes to be seen as unacceptable, the more pressure
governments will be under to expand access to those at the bottom. That
requires lifting the barriers to the on-ramps, and letting more and more people
onto the highway to prosperity.
However,
since such investments require careful planning and huge investments in
infrastructure and human capital, we can expect many politicians to avoid the
issue. Instead, they will focus on the cheaper and easier option of fomenting
popular support by harping on threats to identity and cultural issues, the
usual populist and nationalist tactics. Populism and nationalism work, in the
short-term at least, because they foster a powerful sense of inclusion, often
achieved by excluding and denigrating others.
Conservatism and exclusion
To answer the question I started with, yes, exclusion is socially acceptable when it is based on a clear rationale and transparency. But that may just be the liberal perspective. In many countries, social norms among conservatives relating to exclusion are increasingly discriminatory.
Thus, for the voters who put leaders in power — such as the U.S.’s Donald Trump, Brazil’s Jaime Bolsonaro, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, the UK’s Boris Johnson (elected by Tory party members, anyway), Israel’s Netanyahu — exclusion based on identity is now perfectly acceptable. After all, among the party loyal, trashing the “other” creates a wonderful sense of belonging. Even better, to create a sense of happy security, is the putting up of walls and gates, or pulling up the drawbridge, à la Brexit.
What, if anything, can dilute this growing penchant for exclusion? Can broad-based economic growth contribute to leveling the playing field? Do we need new laws or policies? The fact that most economists are expecting a global recession to kick in in the not-too-distant future should be worrying.
If, in times of relative prosperity demonizing the other works so well, just wait until national economies hit the skids. That’s when we may see the cracks in society turn into unbridgeable cleavages.
The issue of social exclusion in its various forms has been on my mind lately. The contrast between the liberal rhetoric to promote greater social and economic participation on the one side, and the countervailing rhetoric about walls and keeping people out, on the other, seems to be starker than ever. However, I don’t think it is a stretch to say that these dueling tendencies – to band together or to fend off outsiders – are both timeless aspects human nature.
Today’s entry will mark the beginning of a new blog series
devoted to exploring the vast subject of exclusion.
Why talk about exclusion in a blog devoted to evaluation and international development topics? For one, because the contrast between the recent extremist exclusionary talk and behavior in politics (in the U.S. as well as globally) and the more inclusive rhetoric pervading the development aid world is so striking. Another reason is related to domestic, U.S. attitudes. A significant share of U.S. society doesn’t seem to believe in inclusion, in helping others get in. Given the support for President Trump’s rhetoric on building walls and keeping out migrants (88 percent of Republicans approve of the job he is doing, according to the August 1-14, 2019 Gallup poll), what does this portend for a foreign aid policy that, up until now, has pointed mostly in the other direction?
Rhetoric spills into action
Exclusion manifests itself in many ways: moats, walls,
xenophobia, nationalism, nativism, racism, sexism, tribalism, ethnic cleansing,
genocide. It can range from the relatively passive — such as barring “others,”
like migrants, from entering — to the active, such as expelling
members from a group, to the awful, destroying those perceived as not
belonging.
What prompted these reflections — which I will expand on in
this and posts to follow — is the extreme form that this will to exclude has taken
in the U.S. In the recent El Paso mass shooting a young white man killed 22 Hispanics
at a Walmart store, and injured even more. His purported motive was to kill
immigrants, and defend the country against an “invasion” by immigrants, i.e.
outsiders.
This was but the most recent of a spate of U.S massacres targeting minorities. African Americans, Jews and gays have all been slaughtered on U.S. soil in recent years because of who they are, and because their existence posed a problem.
The shootings can be seen as an extreme manifestation of the desire, as expressed by white nationalist groups and their sympathizers, to rid the U.S. of those who don’t conform to their retrograde vision of who is allowed to be here.
Huddled masses need not apply
Ridding the U.S. of ethnic minorities has a long and
ignominious history. As Michael Luo writes in the August 17, 2019 issue of The New Yorker, the U.S. Senate passed
a bill back in 1882 to bar Chinese immigrants from entering the U.S. The Chinese
Exclusion Act, as it came to be called, was not repealed until 1943. Now the
government is at it again, with new regulations to deny permanent legal status,
or green cards, to immigrants likely to need government services.
This is but the latest in ongoing efforts to reduce
migration flows to the U.S. It has been accompanied by rhetoric and full-blooded
condoning of these views. This exclusion rhetoric has risen dramatically under
President Trump. It started with his announcement of his candidacy and its blatant
anti-immigrant message, calling Mexicans criminals and rapists.
The logic may appear infantile and full of holes, but it
resonated with enough Americans to win him the election. And now there are
those who have reached the conclusion that, if Mexicans are coming here to rape
and commit crimes, then they don’t deserve to live, ergo it is okay to kill
them. It is a vision of keeping the U.S. homogenous, and pure, and returning to
a (relatively small) window in time when most of the settled population was
white —
having killed or enslaved “outside” groups such as native Americans or people
brought over from Africa.
The El Paso killer’s statements on social media conformed
closely to attitudes and language used by Trump supporters and Trump himself.
In July 2019 Trump launched verbal assaults against four Democratic
Congresswomen: “Hey if you don’t like it,
let them leave.” Soon after, supporters at Trump rallies were chanting
“Send her back,” although the President has tried to distance himself from the
chant, if not the sentiment.
Is it simply human nature to exclude others?
First of all, it is true that the phenomenon of one group keeping
outsiders out is neither new nor particularly remarkable. I suppose it has been
with us as long as we’ve been a species. The formation of tribes and nations is
as much about outsiders as it is about members.
I will go further, and argue that exclusion of the many by
the few, or of the few by the many, of casting out and keeping out, is one of
humanity’s leitmotifs. The Bible’s key events often center on exclusion in one
way or another: the fall from Paradise, the Great Flood, the Exodus out of
Egypt, the Chosen People. And the history of the 20th century is
full of myths which fed genocides against minorities, facilitated by modern
organizational capacities of the Nazis in Germany and Central Europe, of Serb
nationalists in Bosnia, of Hutu power in Rwanda, and so on.
Yet as ancient as it is, and as horrific as the 20th
century was for millions of people, it feels like we live in a time where the rhetoric
around social exclusion has entered the political mainstream. Accounts of
political leaders demonizing others feature prominently in the daily news. In
both the U.S. and Europe, rightwing parties have galvanized supporters with
anti-immigrant rhetoric. It has become acceptable again for sizable minorities to,
if you’ll permit the oxymoron, openly embrace the exclusion of others.
Development efforts to promote inclusion
Flipping the coin over to the other side, many of the
international development projects I evaluate aim, among other things, at increasing
inclusion. It is part of their underlying rationale.
Increasing access — to things which many of us in the “developed”
world take for granted — is seen as the key to lifting people out of poverty, and
opening up opportunities they wouldn’t have otherwise. In other words,
development assistance is about inclusion, and not just economic growth.
In recent decades, economists have come to the realization that growth isn’t sufficient
if the gains are not sufficiently dispersed through society.
The World Bank’s mission is “shared prosperity”. The UN
Sustainable Development Goals are replete with the terms “inclusive” and
“access to.” Inclusive growth is now a term. Investing in modernization is at
the core of development efforts in poor countries striving to catch up with
rich ones. It is about reducing the gap between the haves and have-nots. It is
about letting more people in on the fruits of civilization and modern society.
It doesn’t always work out, and the rhetoric is often far ahead of the reality,
but the rhetoric matters. Project goals refer to it and, at least in part, are
often linked to it.
The mechanism for reaching these goals are investments and
policy reforms which expand access to, for example, electricity, healthcare
services, clean water and sanitation, markets, education, and political and
civic inclusion, by way of voter registration programs. The expansion of access
is generally aimed at those who have been left out: the poor, women, youth, disabled
persons, etc.
It is true that development aid will not generally help
people join the most, shall we say, “exciting” tribes that humanity divides
itself into, i.e. those which are defined along ethnic, racial, or religious
lines. That would be antithetical to development aid’s raison d’etre. It
is also true that there are probably not enough resources for the many
currently excluded to access. For example, in 1994 when Malawi adopted a policy
of free primary education by abolishing tuition fees, one unintended
consequence was a severe drop in educational quality, as the system was
overwhelmed. There simply were not enough teachers and schools to handle the
influx.
Even when ineffective or focused on issues other than
access, however, international development never aims at exclusion, at keeping
groups of people down and out. After all, the point is to invest in public
goods, which by definition are both non-excludable and non-rivalrous.
On the whole, development programs do try to increase
capacity to participate in society and its rewards, by reducing some of the
most basic obstacles.
Don’t expect the rhetoric on exclusion to disappear
Now contrast international development policies with the prevalent
desire, among certain outspoken parts of country populations and their
political leaders, to exclude others. Even leaving aside the violent and
genocidal tendencies displayed by fringe groups, and some mass shooters, the basic
desire to keep others out appears to be fairly widespread in the U.S. and many
other countries. Fully one third of the U.S. population believes that migrants
do more harm than benefit to the country. That’s less than the 39 percent who
believe the opposite. But it still amounts to a view held by over 100 million
Americans.
Populist parties in Europe rail against immigrants.
Hungary’s populist and self-proclaimed illiberal Prime Minister Victor Orban has
said that “countries that don’t stop immigration will be
lost,” and keeps winning elections. The UK’s Prime Minister Boris
Johnson, as an MP, based part of his pro-Brexit rhetoric on fears of 80 million
Turks invading the UK. Fallacious, but effective.
It is clearly human nature to think in terms of us and them.
There are just too many people for everyone to be “us.” Someone has to be
“them.” There will always be insiders and outsiders, those who belong to a
group and those who don’t.
It seems that Republicans and Democrats have staked opposing
positions on this terrain. I find it curious how many U.S. Democratic party
positions focus on inclusion, on expanding rights and access for those marginalized.
Consider where Democrats stand, not just on migration, but on health insurance,
abortion rights, voting rights. It’s about bringing people in, not kicking them
out. Social inclusion, in other words.
Republican focus on helping small businesses might be
described as promoting economic inclusion. In my view the effort is a
bit desultory, given Republican handouts to corporate America. And how feasible
economic inclusion is without social inclusion is a matter for debate.
In any case, it is a safe bet that the tension between allowing more people in and keeping them out will never disappear. If those of us who believe in inclusion can at least prevent exclusionary tendencies from turning into genocidal tendencies, that is worth something worth fighting for. And as climate change reduces the ability of populations in some regions to manage, or even survive, you can bet there will be a fight.
Will U.S. foreign aid now succumb to exclusionist impulses? Stay
tuned.
