Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn
COMPARISONS have been made between Donald Trump and Narendra Modi. They may have several facets of personality and politics in common but their routes to power were entirely different.
Modi’s road to becoming prime minister was enabled by bloodshed and a state that is swamped by a rapacious variant of capitalist ideology that profits from Hindutva. The phlegmatic Manmohan Singh was its misleading poster boy. Trump’s rise to power was strongly resisted, on the other hand, by a subtler corporate system driven by the deep state. Genial Obama was the veneer.
Manmohan Singh, for all his mild manners, classified the country’s most impoverished tribespeople as the biggest security challenge. On behalf of usurious capitalism, he unleashed a military campaign against the forest dwellers in which women continue to be raped and homes uprooted. Some women abused and tortured by the police in Chhattisgarh were in Delhi to share their ordeal on Sunday. Singh unleashed state terror on anti-nuclear villagers who opposed controversial Russian-built nuclear reactors near their southern hamlets, which they fear are potentially worse than Fukushima’s.
Singh prophesied that Modi, if he won, would be a disaster for India. But Modi has only added narrow nationalism and its bloodier prescriptions to the quiver he inherited from Singh. Business tycoons that supported Singh are sworn allies of Modi.
Obama, like his predecessors, dropped bombs at will over Afghanistan, and contrived, in harness with Hillary Clinton, the depredation of a secular Syria and a secular Libya. Trump, albeit from a white supremacist plank, has asked inconvenient questions about the decimation of secular Arab satraps who had successfully kept the lid on a fanatical religious genie. Modi has uncorked the evil spirit of Hindutva, not learning from the tragedy that befell the neighbours when Ziaul Haq let loose Islamic revivalism as a tool of governance.
As Singh thought of Modi, Obama too cautioned that Trump would be disastrous for America. Singh and Obama were prophetic about their successors; of that there should be no doubt. But they were both accomplices in their rise. That too is indisputable.
There is a preponderance of embedded journalism in both chest-thumping democracies, embedded meaning lying in bed with the state. As his American cousins had done in Iraq, a BBC journalist, unbelievably, rode astride a tank to liberate Kabul. His Indian counterparts brought the Kargil war into Indian drawing rooms with their helmets on. Images of the bloody war on colour TV, replete with an American-style trail of body bags of fallen soldiers all the way to their usefully filmed funeral scenes helped enliven a genre of nationalism that was barely dormant.
Nationalism thus fanned mutated soon enough to become a scourge for many helmet-embracing journalists, but the penny still doesn’t seem to have dropped. One of them says she loves Kashmir and the Indian army in the same breath but fails to notice the inherent contrariness of her loves. And she also loves capitalism, the Indian TV anchor who left her job recently would say. There is nothing in any of her three loves — Kashmir, army, and capitalism — that reveals a less than robust nationalist bone.
A burgeoning mass of Indians is similarly failing to see the umbilical ties between militarism and communalism, between nationalism and fascism of which India’s rapacious genre of capitalism is an energising force. Adam Smith would have cringed.
Trump’s luck with the media was opposite of Modi’s. CNN and the New York Times have emerged as his most implacable critics in the American media. He struggled for a while even with arch-right-wing Fox News. All were complicit in the tragic unravelling of the secular Iraqi state and earlier in the sacking of Afghanistan. The media sold unverified tales of hidden weapons of mass destruction. Remember?
Trump has said many things that are downright gut-wrenching to any liberal sensibility, but one belief he has held on to would make even his Israeli allies hate him. That’s his criticism of Iraq’s invasion by America.
Trump’s visa restrictions on Muslims, however, are a copyright infringement. Modi excluded Muslim asylum seekers first. Trump is soft on Syria’s Christian refugees to placate a domestic constituency; Modi is wooing Hindu Bangladeshis.
In a world where old problems, new headaches and daily mood swings are all delivered through television, there is a distinct possibility for the masses to be swayed by an absence of reason.
Early experiments showed we could be persuaded to choose a brand of cigarettes by flashing wild stallions, unrelated to the topic, in the backdrop of Marlboro country. Ford cars would leap between rugged hills to woo customers who had to otherwise pass a rigid set of driving tests to get a licence to precisely not try the tricks. Cigarettes cause cancer just as climbing vertical cliffs, if at all possible, would wreck the car if not also kill the driver. But that realisation is a rare and usually delayed intuition. The ‘informed’ choice TV boasts is, more often than not, pure bad advice.
You can’t have a debate with a TV ad. It’s a monologue. Trump and Modi have this in common. They hate to face questions. They avoid news conferences. They both tweet. They give exclusive and by implication friendly interviews. Modi speaks routinely on the radio, which has remained the most compelling means of collaring the masses since the Third Reich.
I am sure Trump will soon be discovering the miracles of the radio. Orwell’s 1984 is selling feverishly across America. The fractious opposition that helped Trump’s rise is now standing up to him. That possibility looks distant in a nuclear-tipped India where the opposition seems more troubled by the rise of Arvind Kejriwal, a democrat, than by Modi, a potential fascist. Julian Assange described Clinton and Trump as a choice between gonorrhoea and cholera. With Europe in right-wing ferment and India in free fall, Assange may soon find it difficult to tell the difference.
Showing posts with label choice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label choice. Show all posts
Thursday 2 February 2017
Thursday 19 January 2017
How statistics lost their power
William Davies in The Guardian
In theory, statistics should help settle arguments. They ought to provide stable reference points that everyone – no matter what their politics – can agree on. Yet in recent years, divergent levels of trust in statistics has become one of the key schisms that have opened up in western liberal democracies. Shortly before the November presidential election, a study in the US discovered that 68% of Trump supporters distrusted the economic data published by the federal government. In the UK, a research project by Cambridge University and YouGov looking at conspiracy theories discovered that 55% of the population believes that the government “is hiding the truth about the number of immigrants living here”.
Rather than diffusing controversy and polarisation, it seems as if statistics are actually stoking them. Antipathy to statistics has become one of the hallmarks of the populist right, with statisticians and economists chief among the various “experts” that were ostensibly rejected by voters in 2016. Not only are statistics viewed by many as untrustworthy, there appears to be something almost insulting or arrogant about them. Reducing social and economic issues to numerical aggregates and averages seems to violate some people’s sense of political decency.
Nowhere is this more vividly manifest than with immigration. The thinktank British Future has studied how best to win arguments in favour of immigration and multiculturalism. One of its main findings is that people often respond warmly to qualitative evidence, such as the stories of individual migrants and photographs of diverse communities. But statistics – especially regarding alleged benefits of migration to Britain’s economy – elicit quite the opposite reaction. People assume that the numbers are manipulated and dislike the elitism of resorting to quantitative evidence. Presented with official estimates of how many immigrants are in the country illegally, a common response is to scoff. Far from increasing support for immigration, British Future found, pointing to its positive effect on GDP can actually make people more hostile to it. GDP itself has come to seem like a Trojan horse for an elitist liberal agenda. Sensing this, politicians have now largely abandoned discussing immigration in economic terms.
All of this presents a serious challenge for liberal democracy. Put bluntly, the British government – its officials, experts, advisers and many of its politicians – does believe that immigration is on balance good for the economy. The British government did believe that Brexit was the wrong choice. The problem is that the government is now engaged in self-censorship, for fear of provoking people further.
This is an unwelcome dilemma. Either the state continues to make claims that it believes to be valid and is accused by sceptics of propaganda, or else, politicians and officials are confined to saying what feels plausible and intuitively true, but may ultimately be inaccurate. Either way, politics becomes mired in accusations of lies and cover-ups.
The declining authority of statistics – and the experts who analyse them – is at the heart of the crisis that has become known as “post-truth” politics. And in this uncertain new world, attitudes towards quantitative expertise have become increasingly divided. From one perspective, grounding politics in statistics is elitist, undemocratic and oblivious to people’s emotional investments in their community and nation. It is just one more way that privileged people in London, Washington DC or Brussels seek to impose their worldview on everybody else. From the opposite perspective, statistics are quite the opposite of elitist. They enable journalists, citizens and politicians to discuss society as a whole, not on the basis of anecdote, sentiment or prejudice, but in ways that can be validated. The alternative to quantitative expertise is less likely to be democracy than an unleashing of tabloid editors and demagogues to provide their own “truth” of what is going on across society.
Is there a way out of this polarisation? Must we simply choose between a politics of facts and one of emotions, or is there another way of looking at this situation? One way is to view statistics through the lens of their history. We need to try and see them for what they are: neither unquestionable truths nor elite conspiracies, but rather as tools designed to simplify the job of government, for better or worse. Viewed historically, we can see what a crucial role statistics have played in our understanding of nation states and their progress. This raises the alarming question of how – if at all – we will continue to have common ideas of society and collective progress, should statistics fall by the wayside.
In the second half of the 17th century, in the aftermath of prolonged and bloody conflicts, European rulers adopted an entirely new perspective on the task of government, focused upon demographic trends – an approach made possible by the birth of modern statistics. Since ancient times, censuses had been used to track population size, but these were costly and laborious to carry out and focused on citizens who were considered politically important (property-owning men), rather than society as a whole. Statistics offered something quite different, transforming the nature of politics in the process.
Statistics were designed to give an understanding of a population in its entirety,rather than simply to pinpoint strategically valuable sources of power and wealth. In the early days, this didn’t always involve producing numbers. In Germany, for example (from where we get the term Statistik) the challenge was to map disparate customs, institutions and laws across an empire of hundreds of micro-states. What characterised this knowledge as statistical was its holistic nature: it aimed to produce a picture of the nation as a whole. Statistics would do for populations what cartography did for territory.
Equally significant was the inspiration of the natural sciences. Thanks to standardised measures and mathematical techniques, statistical knowledge could be presented as objective, in much the same way as astronomy. Pioneering English demographers such as William Petty and John Graunt adapted mathematical techniques to estimate population changes, for which they were hired by Oliver Cromwell and Charles II.
The emergence in the late 17th century of government advisers claiming scientific authority, rather than political or military acumen, represents the origins of the “expert” culture now so reviled by populists. These path-breaking individuals were neither pure scholars nor government officials, but hovered somewhere between the two. They were enthusiastic amateurs who offered a new way of thinking about populations that privileged aggregates and objective facts. Thanks to their mathematical prowess, they believed they could calculate what would otherwise require a vast census to discover.
There was initially only one client for this type of expertise, and the clue is in the word “statistics”. Only centralised nation states had the capacity to collect data across large populations in a standardised fashion and only states had any need for such data in the first place. Over the second half of the 18th century, European states began to collect more statistics of the sort that would appear familiar to us today. Casting an eye over national populations, states became focused upon a range of quantities: births, deaths, baptisms, marriages, harvests, imports, exports, price fluctuations. Things that would previously have been registered locally and variously at parish level became aggregated at a national level.
New techniques were developed to represent these indicators, which exploited both the vertical and horizontal dimensions of the page, laying out data in matrices and tables, just as merchants had done with the development of standardised book-keeping techniques in the late 15th century. Organising numbers into rows and columns offered a powerful new way of displaying the attributes of a given society. Large, complex issues could now be surveyed simply by scanning the data laid out geometrically across a single page.
These innovations carried extraordinary potential for governments. By simplifying diverse populations down to specific indicators, and displaying them in suitable tables, governments could circumvent the need to acquire broader detailed local and historical insight. Of course, viewed from a different perspective, this blindness to local cultural variability is precisely what makes statistics vulgar and potentially offensive. Regardless of whether a given nation had any common cultural identity, statisticians would assume some standard uniformity or, some might argue, impose that uniformity upon it.
Not every aspect of a given population can be captured by statistics. There is always an implicit choice in what is included and what is excluded, and this choice can become a political issue in its own right. The fact that GDP only captures the value of paid work, thereby excluding the work traditionally done by women in the domestic sphere, has made it a target of feminist critique since the 1960s. In France, it has been illegal to collect census data on ethnicity since 1978, on the basis that such data could be used for racist political purposes. (This has the side-effect of making systemic racism in the labour market much harder to quantify.)
Despite these criticisms, the aspiration to depict a society in its entirety, and to do so in an objective fashion, has meant that various progressive ideals have been attached to statistics. The image of statistics as a dispassionate science of society is only one part of the story. The other part is about how powerful political ideals became invested in these techniques: ideals of “evidence-based policy”, rationality, progress and nationhood grounded in facts, rather than in romanticised stories.
Since the high-point of the Enlightenment in the late 18th century, liberals and republicans have invested great hope that national measurement frameworks could produce a more rational politics, organised around demonstrable improvements in social and economic life. The great theorist of nationalism, Benedict Anderson, famously described nations as “imagined communities”, but statistics offer the promise of anchoring this imagination in something tangible. Equally, they promise to reveal what historical path the nation is on: what kind of progress is occurring? How rapidly? For Enlightenment liberals, who saw nations as moving in a single historical direction, this question was crucial.
The potential of statistics to reveal the state of the nation was seized in post-revolutionary France. The Jacobin state set about imposing a whole new framework of national measurement and national data collection. The world’s first official bureau of statistics was opened in Paris in 1800. Uniformity of data collection, overseen by a centralised cadre of highly educated experts, was an integral part of the ideal of a centrally governed republic, which sought to establish a unified, egalitarian society.
From the Enlightenment onwards, statistics played an increasingly important role in the public sphere, informing debate in the media, providing social movements with evidence they could use. Over time, the production and analysis of such data became less dominated by the state. Academic social scientists began to analyse data for their own purposes, often entirely unconnected to government policy goals. By the late 19th century, reformers such as Charles Booth in London and WEB Du Bois in Philadelphia were conducting their own surveys to understand urban poverty.
In theory, statistics should help settle arguments. They ought to provide stable reference points that everyone – no matter what their politics – can agree on. Yet in recent years, divergent levels of trust in statistics has become one of the key schisms that have opened up in western liberal democracies. Shortly before the November presidential election, a study in the US discovered that 68% of Trump supporters distrusted the economic data published by the federal government. In the UK, a research project by Cambridge University and YouGov looking at conspiracy theories discovered that 55% of the population believes that the government “is hiding the truth about the number of immigrants living here”.
Rather than diffusing controversy and polarisation, it seems as if statistics are actually stoking them. Antipathy to statistics has become one of the hallmarks of the populist right, with statisticians and economists chief among the various “experts” that were ostensibly rejected by voters in 2016. Not only are statistics viewed by many as untrustworthy, there appears to be something almost insulting or arrogant about them. Reducing social and economic issues to numerical aggregates and averages seems to violate some people’s sense of political decency.
Nowhere is this more vividly manifest than with immigration. The thinktank British Future has studied how best to win arguments in favour of immigration and multiculturalism. One of its main findings is that people often respond warmly to qualitative evidence, such as the stories of individual migrants and photographs of diverse communities. But statistics – especially regarding alleged benefits of migration to Britain’s economy – elicit quite the opposite reaction. People assume that the numbers are manipulated and dislike the elitism of resorting to quantitative evidence. Presented with official estimates of how many immigrants are in the country illegally, a common response is to scoff. Far from increasing support for immigration, British Future found, pointing to its positive effect on GDP can actually make people more hostile to it. GDP itself has come to seem like a Trojan horse for an elitist liberal agenda. Sensing this, politicians have now largely abandoned discussing immigration in economic terms.
All of this presents a serious challenge for liberal democracy. Put bluntly, the British government – its officials, experts, advisers and many of its politicians – does believe that immigration is on balance good for the economy. The British government did believe that Brexit was the wrong choice. The problem is that the government is now engaged in self-censorship, for fear of provoking people further.
This is an unwelcome dilemma. Either the state continues to make claims that it believes to be valid and is accused by sceptics of propaganda, or else, politicians and officials are confined to saying what feels plausible and intuitively true, but may ultimately be inaccurate. Either way, politics becomes mired in accusations of lies and cover-ups.
The declining authority of statistics – and the experts who analyse them – is at the heart of the crisis that has become known as “post-truth” politics. And in this uncertain new world, attitudes towards quantitative expertise have become increasingly divided. From one perspective, grounding politics in statistics is elitist, undemocratic and oblivious to people’s emotional investments in their community and nation. It is just one more way that privileged people in London, Washington DC or Brussels seek to impose their worldview on everybody else. From the opposite perspective, statistics are quite the opposite of elitist. They enable journalists, citizens and politicians to discuss society as a whole, not on the basis of anecdote, sentiment or prejudice, but in ways that can be validated. The alternative to quantitative expertise is less likely to be democracy than an unleashing of tabloid editors and demagogues to provide their own “truth” of what is going on across society.
Is there a way out of this polarisation? Must we simply choose between a politics of facts and one of emotions, or is there another way of looking at this situation? One way is to view statistics through the lens of their history. We need to try and see them for what they are: neither unquestionable truths nor elite conspiracies, but rather as tools designed to simplify the job of government, for better or worse. Viewed historically, we can see what a crucial role statistics have played in our understanding of nation states and their progress. This raises the alarming question of how – if at all – we will continue to have common ideas of society and collective progress, should statistics fall by the wayside.
In the second half of the 17th century, in the aftermath of prolonged and bloody conflicts, European rulers adopted an entirely new perspective on the task of government, focused upon demographic trends – an approach made possible by the birth of modern statistics. Since ancient times, censuses had been used to track population size, but these were costly and laborious to carry out and focused on citizens who were considered politically important (property-owning men), rather than society as a whole. Statistics offered something quite different, transforming the nature of politics in the process.
Statistics were designed to give an understanding of a population in its entirety,rather than simply to pinpoint strategically valuable sources of power and wealth. In the early days, this didn’t always involve producing numbers. In Germany, for example (from where we get the term Statistik) the challenge was to map disparate customs, institutions and laws across an empire of hundreds of micro-states. What characterised this knowledge as statistical was its holistic nature: it aimed to produce a picture of the nation as a whole. Statistics would do for populations what cartography did for territory.
Equally significant was the inspiration of the natural sciences. Thanks to standardised measures and mathematical techniques, statistical knowledge could be presented as objective, in much the same way as astronomy. Pioneering English demographers such as William Petty and John Graunt adapted mathematical techniques to estimate population changes, for which they were hired by Oliver Cromwell and Charles II.
The emergence in the late 17th century of government advisers claiming scientific authority, rather than political or military acumen, represents the origins of the “expert” culture now so reviled by populists. These path-breaking individuals were neither pure scholars nor government officials, but hovered somewhere between the two. They were enthusiastic amateurs who offered a new way of thinking about populations that privileged aggregates and objective facts. Thanks to their mathematical prowess, they believed they could calculate what would otherwise require a vast census to discover.
There was initially only one client for this type of expertise, and the clue is in the word “statistics”. Only centralised nation states had the capacity to collect data across large populations in a standardised fashion and only states had any need for such data in the first place. Over the second half of the 18th century, European states began to collect more statistics of the sort that would appear familiar to us today. Casting an eye over national populations, states became focused upon a range of quantities: births, deaths, baptisms, marriages, harvests, imports, exports, price fluctuations. Things that would previously have been registered locally and variously at parish level became aggregated at a national level.
New techniques were developed to represent these indicators, which exploited both the vertical and horizontal dimensions of the page, laying out data in matrices and tables, just as merchants had done with the development of standardised book-keeping techniques in the late 15th century. Organising numbers into rows and columns offered a powerful new way of displaying the attributes of a given society. Large, complex issues could now be surveyed simply by scanning the data laid out geometrically across a single page.
These innovations carried extraordinary potential for governments. By simplifying diverse populations down to specific indicators, and displaying them in suitable tables, governments could circumvent the need to acquire broader detailed local and historical insight. Of course, viewed from a different perspective, this blindness to local cultural variability is precisely what makes statistics vulgar and potentially offensive. Regardless of whether a given nation had any common cultural identity, statisticians would assume some standard uniformity or, some might argue, impose that uniformity upon it.
Not every aspect of a given population can be captured by statistics. There is always an implicit choice in what is included and what is excluded, and this choice can become a political issue in its own right. The fact that GDP only captures the value of paid work, thereby excluding the work traditionally done by women in the domestic sphere, has made it a target of feminist critique since the 1960s. In France, it has been illegal to collect census data on ethnicity since 1978, on the basis that such data could be used for racist political purposes. (This has the side-effect of making systemic racism in the labour market much harder to quantify.)
Despite these criticisms, the aspiration to depict a society in its entirety, and to do so in an objective fashion, has meant that various progressive ideals have been attached to statistics. The image of statistics as a dispassionate science of society is only one part of the story. The other part is about how powerful political ideals became invested in these techniques: ideals of “evidence-based policy”, rationality, progress and nationhood grounded in facts, rather than in romanticised stories.
Since the high-point of the Enlightenment in the late 18th century, liberals and republicans have invested great hope that national measurement frameworks could produce a more rational politics, organised around demonstrable improvements in social and economic life. The great theorist of nationalism, Benedict Anderson, famously described nations as “imagined communities”, but statistics offer the promise of anchoring this imagination in something tangible. Equally, they promise to reveal what historical path the nation is on: what kind of progress is occurring? How rapidly? For Enlightenment liberals, who saw nations as moving in a single historical direction, this question was crucial.
The potential of statistics to reveal the state of the nation was seized in post-revolutionary France. The Jacobin state set about imposing a whole new framework of national measurement and national data collection. The world’s first official bureau of statistics was opened in Paris in 1800. Uniformity of data collection, overseen by a centralised cadre of highly educated experts, was an integral part of the ideal of a centrally governed republic, which sought to establish a unified, egalitarian society.
From the Enlightenment onwards, statistics played an increasingly important role in the public sphere, informing debate in the media, providing social movements with evidence they could use. Over time, the production and analysis of such data became less dominated by the state. Academic social scientists began to analyse data for their own purposes, often entirely unconnected to government policy goals. By the late 19th century, reformers such as Charles Booth in London and WEB Du Bois in Philadelphia were conducting their own surveys to understand urban poverty.
Illustration by Guardian Design
To recognise how statistics have been entangled in notions of national progress, consider the case of GDP. GDP is an estimate of the sum total of a nation’s consumer spending, government spending, investments and trade balance (exports minus imports), which is represented in a single number. This is fiendishly difficult to get right, and efforts to calculate this figure began, like so many mathematical techniques, as a matter of marginal, somewhat nerdish interest during the 1930s. It was only elevated to a matter of national political urgency by the second world war, when governments needed to know whether the national population was producing enough to keep up the war effort. In the decades that followed, this single indicator, though never without its critics, took on a hallowed political status, as the ultimate barometer of a government’s competence. Whether GDP is rising or falling is now virtually a proxy for whether society is moving forwards or backwards.
Or take the example of opinion polling, an early instance of statistical innovation occurring in the private sector. During the 1920s, statisticians developed methods for identifying a representative sample of survey respondents, so as to glean the attitudes of the public as a whole. This breakthrough, which was first seized upon by market researchers, soon led to the birth of the opinion polling. This new industry immediately became the object of public and political fascination, as the media reported on what this new science told us about what “women” or “Americans” or “manual labourers” thought about the world.
Nowadays, the flaws of polling are endlessly picked apart. But this is partly due to the tremendous hopes that have been invested in polling since its origins. It is only to the extent that we believe in mass democracy that we are so fascinated or concerned by what the public thinks. But for the most part it is thanks to statistics, and not to democratic institutions as such, that we can know what the public thinks about specific issues. We underestimate how much of our sense of “the public interest” is rooted in expert calculation, as opposed to democratic institutions.
As indicators of health, prosperity, equality, opinion and quality of life have come to tell us who we are collectively and whether things are getting better or worse, politicians have leaned heavily on statistics to buttress their authority. Often, they lean too heavily, stretching evidence too far, interpreting data too loosely, to serve their cause. But that is an inevitable hazard of the prevalence of numbers in public life, and need not necessarily trigger the type of wholehearted rejections of expertise that we have witnessed recently.
In many ways, the contemporary populist attack on “experts” is born out of the same resentment as the attack on elected representatives. In talking of society as a whole, in seeking to govern the economy as a whole, both politicians and technocrats are believed to have “lost touch” with how it feels to be a single citizen in particular. Both statisticians and politicians have fallen into the trap of “seeing like a state”, to use a phrase from the anarchist political thinker James C Scott. Speaking scientifically about the nation – for instance in terms of macroeconomics – is an insult to those who would prefer to rely on memory and narrative for their sense of nationhood, and are sick of being told that their “imagined community” does not exist.
On the other hand, statistics (together with elected representatives) performed an adequate job of supporting a credible public discourse for decades if not centuries. What changed?
The crisis of statistics is not quite as sudden as it might seem. For roughly 450 years, the great achievement of statisticians has been to reduce the complexity and fluidity of national populations into manageable, comprehensible facts and figures. Yet in recent decades, the world has changed dramatically, thanks to the cultural politics that emerged in the 1960s and the reshaping of the global economy that began soon after. It is not clear that the statisticians have always kept pace with these changes. Traditional forms of statistical classification and definition are coming under strain from more fluid identities, attitudes and economic pathways. Efforts to represent demographic, social and economic changes in terms of simple, well-recognised indicators are losing legitimacy.
Consider the changing political and economic geography of nation states over the past 40 years. The statistics that dominate political debate are largely national in character: poverty levels, unemployment, GDP, net migration. But the geography of capitalism has been pulling in somewhat different directions. Plainly globalisation has not rendered geography irrelevant. In many cases it has made the location of economic activity far more important, exacerbating the inequality between successful locations (such as London or San Francisco) and less successful locations (such as north-east England or the US rust belt). The key geographic units involved are no longer nation states. Rather, it is cities, regions or individual urban neighbourhoods that are rising and falling.
The Enlightenment ideal of the nation as a single community, bound together by a common measurement framework, is harder and harder to sustain. If you live in one of the towns in the Welsh valleys that was once dependent on steel manufacturing or mining for jobs, politicians talking of how “the economy” is “doing well” are likely to breed additional resentment. From that standpoint, the term “GDP” fails to capture anything meaningful or credible.
When macroeconomics is used to make a political argument, this implies that the losses in one part of the country are offset by gains somewhere else. Headline-grabbing national indicators, such as GDP and inflation, conceal all sorts of localised gains and losses that are less commonly discussed by national politicians. Immigration may be good for the economy overall, but this does not mean that there are no local costs at all. So when politicians use national indicators to make their case, they implicitly assume some spirit of patriotic mutual sacrifice on the part of voters: you might be the loser on this occasion, but next time you might be the beneficiary. But what if the tables are never turned? What if the same city or region wins over and over again, while others always lose? On what principle of give and take is that justified?
In Europe, the currency union has exacerbated this problem. The indicators that matter to the European Central Bank (ECB), for example, are those representing half a billion people. The ECB is concerned with the inflation or unemployment rate across the eurozone as if it were a single homogeneous territory, at the same time as the economic fate of European citizens is splintering in different directions, depending on which region, city or neighbourhood they happen to live in. Official knowledge becomes ever more abstracted from lived experience, until that knowledge simply ceases to be relevant or credible.
The privileging of the nation as the natural scale of analysis is one of the inbuilt biases of statistics that years of economic change has eaten away at. Another inbuilt bias that is coming under increasing strain is classification. Part of the job of statisticians is to classify people by putting them into a range of boxes that the statistician has created: employed or unemployed, married or unmarried, pro-Europe or anti-Europe. So long as people can be placed into categories in this way, it becomes possible to discern how far a given classification extends across the population.
This can involve somewhat reductive choices. To count as unemployed, for example, a person has to report to a survey that they are involuntarily out of work, even if it may be more complicated than that in reality. Many people move in and out of work all the time, for reasons that might have as much to do with health and family needs as labour market conditions. But thanks to this simplification, it becomes possible to identify the rate of unemployment across the population as a whole.
Here’s a problem, though. What if many of the defining questions of our age are not answerable in terms of the extent of people encompassed, but the intensity with which people are affected? Unemployment is one example. The fact that Britain got through the Great Recession of 2008-13 without unemployment rising substantially is generally viewed as a positive achievement. But the focus on “unemployment” masked the rise of underemployment, that is, people not getting a sufficient amount of work or being employed at a level below that which they are qualified for. This currently accounts for around 6% of the “employed” labour force. Then there is the rise of the self-employed workforce, where the divide between “employed” and “involuntarily unemployed” makes little sense.
This is not a criticism of bodies such as the Office for National Statistics (ONS), which does now produce data on underemployment. But so long as politicians continue to deflect criticism by pointing to the unemployment rate, the experiences of those struggling to get enough work or to live on their wages go unrepresented in public debate. It wouldn’t be all that surprising if these same people became suspicious of policy experts and the use of statistics in political debate, given the mismatch between what politicians say about the labour market and the lived reality.
The rise of identity politics since the 1960s has put additional strain on such systems of classification. Statistical data is only credible if people will accept the limited range of demographic categories that are on offer, which are selected by the expert not the respondent. But where identity becomes a political issue, people demand to define themselves on their own terms, where gender, sexuality, race or class is concerned.
Opinion polling may be suffering for similar reasons. Polls have traditionally captured people’s attitudes and preferences, on the reasonable assumption that people will behave accordingly. But in an age of declining political participation, it is not enough simply to know which box someone would prefer to put an “X” in. One also needs to know whether they feel strongly enough about doing so to bother. And when it comes to capturing such fluctuations in emotional intensity, polling is a clumsy tool.
Statistics have faced criticism regularly over their long history. The challenges that identity politics and globalisation present to them are not new either. Why then do the events of the past year feel quite so damaging to the ideal of quantitative expertise and its role in political debate?
In recent years, a new way of quantifying and visualising populations has emerged that potentially pushes statistics to the margins, ushering in a different era altogether. Statistics, collected and compiled by technical experts, are giving way to data that accumulates by default, as a consequence of sweeping digitisation. Traditionally, statisticians have known which questions they wanted to ask regarding which population, then set out to answer them. By contrast, data is automatically produced whenever we swipe a loyalty card, comment on Facebook or search for something on Google. As our cities, cars, homes and household objects become digitally connected, the amount of data we leave in our trail will grow even greater. In this new world, data is captured first and research questions come later.
In the long term, the implications of this will probably be as profound as the invention of statistics was in the late 17th century. The rise of “big data” provides far greater opportunities for quantitative analysis than any amount of polling or statistical modelling. But it is not just the quantity of data that is different. It represents an entirely different type of knowledge, accompanied by a new mode of expertise.
First, there is no fixed scale of analysis (such as the nation) nor any settled categories (such as “unemployed”). These vast new data sets can be mined in search of patterns, trends, correlations and emergent moods. It becomes a way of tracking the identities that people bestow upon themselves (such as “#ImwithCorbyn” or “entrepreneur”) rather than imposing classifications upon them. This is a form of aggregation suitable to a more fluid political age, in which not everything can be reliably referred back to some Enlightenment ideal of the nation state as guardian of the public interest.
Second, the majority of us are entirely oblivious to what all this data says about us, either individually or collectively. There is no equivalent of an Office for National Statistics for commercially collected big data. We live in an age in which our feelings, identities and affiliations can be tracked and analysed with unprecedented speed and sensitivity – but there is nothing that anchors this new capacity in the public interest or public debate. There are data analysts who work for Google and Facebook, but they are not “experts” of the sort who generate statistics and who are now so widely condemned. The anonymity and secrecy of the new analysts potentially makes them far more politically powerful than any social scientist.
A company such as Facebook has the capacity to carry quantitative social science on hundreds of billions of people, at very low cost. But it has very little incentive to reveal the results. In 2014, when Facebook researchers published results of a study of “emotional contagion” that they had carried out on their users – in which they altered news feeds to see how it affected the content that users then shared in response – there was an outcry that people were being unwittingly experimented on. So, from Facebook’s point of view, why go to all the hassle of publishing? Why not just do the study and keep quiet?
What is most politically significant about this shift from a logic of statistics to one of data is how comfortably it sits with the rise of populism. Populist leaders can heap scorn upon traditional experts, such as economists and pollsters, while trusting in a different form of numerical analysis altogether. Such politicians rely on a new, less visible elite, who seek out patterns from vast data banks, but rarely make any public pronouncements, let alone publish any evidence. These data analysts are often physicists or mathematicians, whose skills are not developed for the study of society at all. This, for example, is the worldview propagated by Dominic Cummings, former adviser to Michael Gove and campaign director of Vote Leave. “Physics, mathematics and computer science are domains in which there are real experts, unlike macro-economic forecasting,” Cummings has argued.
Figures close to Donald Trump, such as his chief strategist Steve Bannon and the Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, are closely acquainted with cutting-edge data analytics techniques, via companies such as Cambridge Analytica, on whose board Bannon sits. During the presidential election campaign, Cambridge Analytica drew on various data sources to develop psychological profiles of millions of Americans, which it then used to help Trump target voters with tailored messaging.
This ability to develop and refine psychological insights across large populations is one of the most innovative and controversial features of the new data analysis. As techniques of “sentiment analysis”, which detect the mood of large numbers of people by tracking indicators such as word usage on social media, become incorporated into political campaigns, the emotional allure of figures such as Trump will become amenable to scientific scrutiny. In a world where the political feelings of the general public are becoming this traceable, who needs pollsters?
Few social findings arising from this kind of data analytics ever end up in the public domain. This means that it does very little to help anchor political narrative in any shared reality. With the authority of statistics waning, and nothing stepping into the public sphere to replace it, people can live in whatever imagined community they feel most aligned to and willing to believe in. Where statistics can be used to correct faulty claims about the economy or society or population, in an age of data analytics there are few mechanisms to prevent people from giving way to their instinctive reactions or emotional prejudices. On the contrary, companies such as Cambridge Analytica treat those feelings as things to be tracked.
But even if there were an Office for Data Analytics, acting on behalf of the public and government as the ONS does, it is not clear that it would offer the kind of neutral perspective that liberals today are struggling to defend. The new apparatus of number-crunching is well suited to detecting trends, sensing the mood and spotting things as they bubble up. It serves campaign managers and marketers very well. It is less well suited to making the kinds of unambiguous, objective, potentially consensus-forming claims about society that statisticians and economists are paid for.
In this new technical and political climate, it will fall to the new digital elite to identify the facts, projections and truth amid the rushing stream of data that results. Whether indicators such as GDP and unemployment continue to carry political clout remains to be seen, but if they don’t, it won’t necessarily herald the end of experts, less still the end of truth. The question to be taken more seriously, now that numbers are being constantly generated behind our backs and beyond our knowledge, is where the crisis of statistics leaves representative democracy.
On the one hand, it is worth recognising the capacity of long-standing political institutions to fight back. Just as “sharing economy” platforms such as Uber and Airbnb have recently been thwarted by legal rulings (Uber being compelled to recognise drivers as employees, Airbnb being banned altogether by some municipal authorities), privacy and human rights law represents a potential obstacle to the extension of data analytics. What is less clear is how the benefits of digital analytics might ever be offered to the public, in the way that many statistical data sets are. Bodies such as the Open Data Institute, co-founded by Tim Berners-Lee, campaign to make data publicly available, but have little leverage over the corporations where so much of our data now accumulates. Statistics began life as a tool through which the state could view society, but gradually developed into something that academics, civic reformers and businesses had a stake in. But for many data analytics firms, secrecy surrounding methods and sources of data is a competitive advantage that they will not give up voluntarily.
A post-statistical society is a potentially frightening proposition, not because it would lack any forms of truth or expertise altogether, but because it would drastically privatise them. Statistics are one of many pillars of liberalism, indeed of Enlightenment. The experts who produce and use them have become painted as arrogant and oblivious to the emotional and local dimensions of politics. No doubt there are ways in which data collection could be adapted to reflect lived experiences better. But the battle that will need to be waged in the long term is not between an elite-led politics of facts versus a populist politics of feeling. It is between those still committed to public knowledge and public argument and those who profit from the ongoing disintegration of those things.
To recognise how statistics have been entangled in notions of national progress, consider the case of GDP. GDP is an estimate of the sum total of a nation’s consumer spending, government spending, investments and trade balance (exports minus imports), which is represented in a single number. This is fiendishly difficult to get right, and efforts to calculate this figure began, like so many mathematical techniques, as a matter of marginal, somewhat nerdish interest during the 1930s. It was only elevated to a matter of national political urgency by the second world war, when governments needed to know whether the national population was producing enough to keep up the war effort. In the decades that followed, this single indicator, though never without its critics, took on a hallowed political status, as the ultimate barometer of a government’s competence. Whether GDP is rising or falling is now virtually a proxy for whether society is moving forwards or backwards.
Or take the example of opinion polling, an early instance of statistical innovation occurring in the private sector. During the 1920s, statisticians developed methods for identifying a representative sample of survey respondents, so as to glean the attitudes of the public as a whole. This breakthrough, which was first seized upon by market researchers, soon led to the birth of the opinion polling. This new industry immediately became the object of public and political fascination, as the media reported on what this new science told us about what “women” or “Americans” or “manual labourers” thought about the world.
Nowadays, the flaws of polling are endlessly picked apart. But this is partly due to the tremendous hopes that have been invested in polling since its origins. It is only to the extent that we believe in mass democracy that we are so fascinated or concerned by what the public thinks. But for the most part it is thanks to statistics, and not to democratic institutions as such, that we can know what the public thinks about specific issues. We underestimate how much of our sense of “the public interest” is rooted in expert calculation, as opposed to democratic institutions.
As indicators of health, prosperity, equality, opinion and quality of life have come to tell us who we are collectively and whether things are getting better or worse, politicians have leaned heavily on statistics to buttress their authority. Often, they lean too heavily, stretching evidence too far, interpreting data too loosely, to serve their cause. But that is an inevitable hazard of the prevalence of numbers in public life, and need not necessarily trigger the type of wholehearted rejections of expertise that we have witnessed recently.
In many ways, the contemporary populist attack on “experts” is born out of the same resentment as the attack on elected representatives. In talking of society as a whole, in seeking to govern the economy as a whole, both politicians and technocrats are believed to have “lost touch” with how it feels to be a single citizen in particular. Both statisticians and politicians have fallen into the trap of “seeing like a state”, to use a phrase from the anarchist political thinker James C Scott. Speaking scientifically about the nation – for instance in terms of macroeconomics – is an insult to those who would prefer to rely on memory and narrative for their sense of nationhood, and are sick of being told that their “imagined community” does not exist.
On the other hand, statistics (together with elected representatives) performed an adequate job of supporting a credible public discourse for decades if not centuries. What changed?
The crisis of statistics is not quite as sudden as it might seem. For roughly 450 years, the great achievement of statisticians has been to reduce the complexity and fluidity of national populations into manageable, comprehensible facts and figures. Yet in recent decades, the world has changed dramatically, thanks to the cultural politics that emerged in the 1960s and the reshaping of the global economy that began soon after. It is not clear that the statisticians have always kept pace with these changes. Traditional forms of statistical classification and definition are coming under strain from more fluid identities, attitudes and economic pathways. Efforts to represent demographic, social and economic changes in terms of simple, well-recognised indicators are losing legitimacy.
Consider the changing political and economic geography of nation states over the past 40 years. The statistics that dominate political debate are largely national in character: poverty levels, unemployment, GDP, net migration. But the geography of capitalism has been pulling in somewhat different directions. Plainly globalisation has not rendered geography irrelevant. In many cases it has made the location of economic activity far more important, exacerbating the inequality between successful locations (such as London or San Francisco) and less successful locations (such as north-east England or the US rust belt). The key geographic units involved are no longer nation states. Rather, it is cities, regions or individual urban neighbourhoods that are rising and falling.
The Enlightenment ideal of the nation as a single community, bound together by a common measurement framework, is harder and harder to sustain. If you live in one of the towns in the Welsh valleys that was once dependent on steel manufacturing or mining for jobs, politicians talking of how “the economy” is “doing well” are likely to breed additional resentment. From that standpoint, the term “GDP” fails to capture anything meaningful or credible.
When macroeconomics is used to make a political argument, this implies that the losses in one part of the country are offset by gains somewhere else. Headline-grabbing national indicators, such as GDP and inflation, conceal all sorts of localised gains and losses that are less commonly discussed by national politicians. Immigration may be good for the economy overall, but this does not mean that there are no local costs at all. So when politicians use national indicators to make their case, they implicitly assume some spirit of patriotic mutual sacrifice on the part of voters: you might be the loser on this occasion, but next time you might be the beneficiary. But what if the tables are never turned? What if the same city or region wins over and over again, while others always lose? On what principle of give and take is that justified?
In Europe, the currency union has exacerbated this problem. The indicators that matter to the European Central Bank (ECB), for example, are those representing half a billion people. The ECB is concerned with the inflation or unemployment rate across the eurozone as if it were a single homogeneous territory, at the same time as the economic fate of European citizens is splintering in different directions, depending on which region, city or neighbourhood they happen to live in. Official knowledge becomes ever more abstracted from lived experience, until that knowledge simply ceases to be relevant or credible.
The privileging of the nation as the natural scale of analysis is one of the inbuilt biases of statistics that years of economic change has eaten away at. Another inbuilt bias that is coming under increasing strain is classification. Part of the job of statisticians is to classify people by putting them into a range of boxes that the statistician has created: employed or unemployed, married or unmarried, pro-Europe or anti-Europe. So long as people can be placed into categories in this way, it becomes possible to discern how far a given classification extends across the population.
This can involve somewhat reductive choices. To count as unemployed, for example, a person has to report to a survey that they are involuntarily out of work, even if it may be more complicated than that in reality. Many people move in and out of work all the time, for reasons that might have as much to do with health and family needs as labour market conditions. But thanks to this simplification, it becomes possible to identify the rate of unemployment across the population as a whole.
Here’s a problem, though. What if many of the defining questions of our age are not answerable in terms of the extent of people encompassed, but the intensity with which people are affected? Unemployment is one example. The fact that Britain got through the Great Recession of 2008-13 without unemployment rising substantially is generally viewed as a positive achievement. But the focus on “unemployment” masked the rise of underemployment, that is, people not getting a sufficient amount of work or being employed at a level below that which they are qualified for. This currently accounts for around 6% of the “employed” labour force. Then there is the rise of the self-employed workforce, where the divide between “employed” and “involuntarily unemployed” makes little sense.
This is not a criticism of bodies such as the Office for National Statistics (ONS), which does now produce data on underemployment. But so long as politicians continue to deflect criticism by pointing to the unemployment rate, the experiences of those struggling to get enough work or to live on their wages go unrepresented in public debate. It wouldn’t be all that surprising if these same people became suspicious of policy experts and the use of statistics in political debate, given the mismatch between what politicians say about the labour market and the lived reality.
The rise of identity politics since the 1960s has put additional strain on such systems of classification. Statistical data is only credible if people will accept the limited range of demographic categories that are on offer, which are selected by the expert not the respondent. But where identity becomes a political issue, people demand to define themselves on their own terms, where gender, sexuality, race or class is concerned.
Opinion polling may be suffering for similar reasons. Polls have traditionally captured people’s attitudes and preferences, on the reasonable assumption that people will behave accordingly. But in an age of declining political participation, it is not enough simply to know which box someone would prefer to put an “X” in. One also needs to know whether they feel strongly enough about doing so to bother. And when it comes to capturing such fluctuations in emotional intensity, polling is a clumsy tool.
Statistics have faced criticism regularly over their long history. The challenges that identity politics and globalisation present to them are not new either. Why then do the events of the past year feel quite so damaging to the ideal of quantitative expertise and its role in political debate?
In recent years, a new way of quantifying and visualising populations has emerged that potentially pushes statistics to the margins, ushering in a different era altogether. Statistics, collected and compiled by technical experts, are giving way to data that accumulates by default, as a consequence of sweeping digitisation. Traditionally, statisticians have known which questions they wanted to ask regarding which population, then set out to answer them. By contrast, data is automatically produced whenever we swipe a loyalty card, comment on Facebook or search for something on Google. As our cities, cars, homes and household objects become digitally connected, the amount of data we leave in our trail will grow even greater. In this new world, data is captured first and research questions come later.
In the long term, the implications of this will probably be as profound as the invention of statistics was in the late 17th century. The rise of “big data” provides far greater opportunities for quantitative analysis than any amount of polling or statistical modelling. But it is not just the quantity of data that is different. It represents an entirely different type of knowledge, accompanied by a new mode of expertise.
First, there is no fixed scale of analysis (such as the nation) nor any settled categories (such as “unemployed”). These vast new data sets can be mined in search of patterns, trends, correlations and emergent moods. It becomes a way of tracking the identities that people bestow upon themselves (such as “#ImwithCorbyn” or “entrepreneur”) rather than imposing classifications upon them. This is a form of aggregation suitable to a more fluid political age, in which not everything can be reliably referred back to some Enlightenment ideal of the nation state as guardian of the public interest.
Second, the majority of us are entirely oblivious to what all this data says about us, either individually or collectively. There is no equivalent of an Office for National Statistics for commercially collected big data. We live in an age in which our feelings, identities and affiliations can be tracked and analysed with unprecedented speed and sensitivity – but there is nothing that anchors this new capacity in the public interest or public debate. There are data analysts who work for Google and Facebook, but they are not “experts” of the sort who generate statistics and who are now so widely condemned. The anonymity and secrecy of the new analysts potentially makes them far more politically powerful than any social scientist.
A company such as Facebook has the capacity to carry quantitative social science on hundreds of billions of people, at very low cost. But it has very little incentive to reveal the results. In 2014, when Facebook researchers published results of a study of “emotional contagion” that they had carried out on their users – in which they altered news feeds to see how it affected the content that users then shared in response – there was an outcry that people were being unwittingly experimented on. So, from Facebook’s point of view, why go to all the hassle of publishing? Why not just do the study and keep quiet?
What is most politically significant about this shift from a logic of statistics to one of data is how comfortably it sits with the rise of populism. Populist leaders can heap scorn upon traditional experts, such as economists and pollsters, while trusting in a different form of numerical analysis altogether. Such politicians rely on a new, less visible elite, who seek out patterns from vast data banks, but rarely make any public pronouncements, let alone publish any evidence. These data analysts are often physicists or mathematicians, whose skills are not developed for the study of society at all. This, for example, is the worldview propagated by Dominic Cummings, former adviser to Michael Gove and campaign director of Vote Leave. “Physics, mathematics and computer science are domains in which there are real experts, unlike macro-economic forecasting,” Cummings has argued.
Figures close to Donald Trump, such as his chief strategist Steve Bannon and the Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, are closely acquainted with cutting-edge data analytics techniques, via companies such as Cambridge Analytica, on whose board Bannon sits. During the presidential election campaign, Cambridge Analytica drew on various data sources to develop psychological profiles of millions of Americans, which it then used to help Trump target voters with tailored messaging.
This ability to develop and refine psychological insights across large populations is one of the most innovative and controversial features of the new data analysis. As techniques of “sentiment analysis”, which detect the mood of large numbers of people by tracking indicators such as word usage on social media, become incorporated into political campaigns, the emotional allure of figures such as Trump will become amenable to scientific scrutiny. In a world where the political feelings of the general public are becoming this traceable, who needs pollsters?
Few social findings arising from this kind of data analytics ever end up in the public domain. This means that it does very little to help anchor political narrative in any shared reality. With the authority of statistics waning, and nothing stepping into the public sphere to replace it, people can live in whatever imagined community they feel most aligned to and willing to believe in. Where statistics can be used to correct faulty claims about the economy or society or population, in an age of data analytics there are few mechanisms to prevent people from giving way to their instinctive reactions or emotional prejudices. On the contrary, companies such as Cambridge Analytica treat those feelings as things to be tracked.
But even if there were an Office for Data Analytics, acting on behalf of the public and government as the ONS does, it is not clear that it would offer the kind of neutral perspective that liberals today are struggling to defend. The new apparatus of number-crunching is well suited to detecting trends, sensing the mood and spotting things as they bubble up. It serves campaign managers and marketers very well. It is less well suited to making the kinds of unambiguous, objective, potentially consensus-forming claims about society that statisticians and economists are paid for.
In this new technical and political climate, it will fall to the new digital elite to identify the facts, projections and truth amid the rushing stream of data that results. Whether indicators such as GDP and unemployment continue to carry political clout remains to be seen, but if they don’t, it won’t necessarily herald the end of experts, less still the end of truth. The question to be taken more seriously, now that numbers are being constantly generated behind our backs and beyond our knowledge, is where the crisis of statistics leaves representative democracy.
On the one hand, it is worth recognising the capacity of long-standing political institutions to fight back. Just as “sharing economy” platforms such as Uber and Airbnb have recently been thwarted by legal rulings (Uber being compelled to recognise drivers as employees, Airbnb being banned altogether by some municipal authorities), privacy and human rights law represents a potential obstacle to the extension of data analytics. What is less clear is how the benefits of digital analytics might ever be offered to the public, in the way that many statistical data sets are. Bodies such as the Open Data Institute, co-founded by Tim Berners-Lee, campaign to make data publicly available, but have little leverage over the corporations where so much of our data now accumulates. Statistics began life as a tool through which the state could view society, but gradually developed into something that academics, civic reformers and businesses had a stake in. But for many data analytics firms, secrecy surrounding methods and sources of data is a competitive advantage that they will not give up voluntarily.
A post-statistical society is a potentially frightening proposition, not because it would lack any forms of truth or expertise altogether, but because it would drastically privatise them. Statistics are one of many pillars of liberalism, indeed of Enlightenment. The experts who produce and use them have become painted as arrogant and oblivious to the emotional and local dimensions of politics. No doubt there are ways in which data collection could be adapted to reflect lived experiences better. But the battle that will need to be waged in the long term is not between an elite-led politics of facts versus a populist politics of feeling. It is between those still committed to public knowledge and public argument and those who profit from the ongoing disintegration of those things.
Friday 5 February 2016
When economists ignore the human factor, we all pay the price
Timothy Garton Ash in The Guardian
Economics is not a hard science, and mathematical models won’t explain why people behave as they do. A much broader perspective is needed.
Adair Turner argued that ‘the dominant strain of academic economics and of policy-making orthodoxy’ failed to see the crisis coming. Photograph: Bloomberg via Getty Images
The Guardian recently asked nine economists whether we’re heading for another global financial crash and they gave many different answers. Yet still we turn to economists as if they were physicists, armed with scientific predictions about the behaviour of the body economic. We consumers of economics, and economists themselves, need to be more realistic about what economics can do. More modesty on both the supply and the demand side of economics will produce better results.
Following the great crash that began nearly a decade ago, there has been some soul-searching about what economics got wrong. Probably the self-criticism should have been more far-reaching, both in academia and banking, but it’s there if you look for it. In particular, the economic thinkers loosely clustered around George Soros’s Institute for New Economic Thinking (Inet) have produced a telling account of what went wrong.
Adair Turner, who saw top-level decision-making as head of Britain’s Financial Services Authority and now chairs Inet, gives a measured, cogent version of the critique in his book Between Debt and the Devil. Yes, leading academic economists did challenge the mathematical models of market perfection and, yes, financial markets may have followed oversimplistic versions of those models. Nonetheless, Turner argues, “the dominant strain of academic economics and of policy-making orthodoxy” failed to see the crisis coming, and actually contributed to it.
The key flaws were the efficient market hypothesis and the rational expectations hypothesis: economists too often assumed that market actors not only behave rationally but do so according to the same mental models deployed by economists. (Soros himself has spent a half century trying to expose this fallacy.) Modern big-picture economics (macroeconomics) also “largely ignored the operations of the financial system and in particular the role of banks”.
Market fundamentalism understood itself as the diametric opposite of the communist command economy, but in fact made the same cardinal mistake: to believe that a rational model could encompass, predict and optimise the dynamic complexity of collective human behaviour. As Roman Frydman and Michael Goldberg write: “Like a socialist planner, the economist thus believes that he can accomplish great feats, because he supposes that he has finally uncovered the fully determined mechanism which drives market outcomes.”
Large parts of academic economics fell prey to what has been called physics envy, by analogy with the Freudian notion of penis envy. Like some other areas of social science, it aspired to the status, certainty and predictability of physics. I have long thought that this hubris was fed by the fact that economics, alone among the social sciences, has a Nobel prize. Strictly speaking, it is only the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, endowed by the Swedish central bank and first awarded in 1969, not one of the original Nobel prizes. But everyone calls it the Nobel prize. Moreover, politicians and decision-makers listen to economists in ways that they don’t, for example, listen to political scientists of the rational choice school that dominates many American university departments. This may partly be because a politician who practised rational choice politics would soon be kicked out of office, whereas the public has had to pick up the bill for those who practised rational choice economics.
This does not mean we should not pay attention to economists, nor that economics is unworthy of a Nobel prize. It just means it’s not a hard science like physics. Done properly, it takes account of culture, history, geography, institutions, individual and group psychology. John Stuart Mill said: “A man is not likely to be a good economist if he is nothing else,” and John Maynard Keynesobserved that an economist should be “mathematician, historian, statesman and philosopher in some degree”.
In another remarkable formulation, Keynes wrote: “Economics is essentially a moral science.” Indeed, one could argue that the Nobel prize for economics belongs somewhere midway between those for physics, literature and peace.Economics is, at best, a multidimensional, evidence-based craft, alert to all the influences on human behaviour, at once ambitious in scope and modest in its claims for what we can ever predict in human affairs.
What should follow from this revised, new-old understanding of the character and place of economics? I don’t know enough about university economics courses to say whether they need to adapt, but I was struck by a manifesto published a couple of years ago by economics students at Manchester University. This advocated an approach “that begins with economic phenomena and then gives students a toolkit to evaluate how well different perspectives can explain it”, rather than mathematical models based on unrealistic assumptions. (A colleague of mine claims to have heard a fierce argument between two economists in the common room of Nuffield College, Oxford, which culminated in one exclaiming to the other: “All right, assume immortality!”)
If economics is like other disciplines, it probably changes more slowly than it should, because of the strong inertial effect of older faculty personally invested in a certain way of doing the subject. Then there’s the conduct of major players, be they ministers, central bankers or business leaders. I recently read a splendidly robust lecture by the veteran investor Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s partner in Berkshire Hathaway, delivered in 2003, well before the crash. “Berkshire’s whole record has been achieved without paying one ounce of attention to the efficient market theory in its hard form,” he said, adding that the results of that efficient market doctrine in corporate finance “became even sillier than they were in the economics”.
Munger’s sage advice was to restore economics’ proper multidisciplinary character, not overweighting what can be counted against the unquantifiable, nor yielding to the craving for false precision, nor privileging theoretical macroeconomics over the real-life microeconomics that helped guide Berkshire’s long-term investment decisions.
We ordinary punters should learn the same lesson. We should ask of our economists, as of our doctors, only what they can deliver. There is a scientific component to medicine, larger than that in economics, but medical studies themselves indicate how much our health depends on other factors, especially psychological ones, and how much is still unknown. Economists are like doctors, only less so.
The Guardian recently asked nine economists whether we’re heading for another global financial crash and they gave many different answers. Yet still we turn to economists as if they were physicists, armed with scientific predictions about the behaviour of the body economic. We consumers of economics, and economists themselves, need to be more realistic about what economics can do. More modesty on both the supply and the demand side of economics will produce better results.
Following the great crash that began nearly a decade ago, there has been some soul-searching about what economics got wrong. Probably the self-criticism should have been more far-reaching, both in academia and banking, but it’s there if you look for it. In particular, the economic thinkers loosely clustered around George Soros’s Institute for New Economic Thinking (Inet) have produced a telling account of what went wrong.
Adair Turner, who saw top-level decision-making as head of Britain’s Financial Services Authority and now chairs Inet, gives a measured, cogent version of the critique in his book Between Debt and the Devil. Yes, leading academic economists did challenge the mathematical models of market perfection and, yes, financial markets may have followed oversimplistic versions of those models. Nonetheless, Turner argues, “the dominant strain of academic economics and of policy-making orthodoxy” failed to see the crisis coming, and actually contributed to it.
The key flaws were the efficient market hypothesis and the rational expectations hypothesis: economists too often assumed that market actors not only behave rationally but do so according to the same mental models deployed by economists. (Soros himself has spent a half century trying to expose this fallacy.) Modern big-picture economics (macroeconomics) also “largely ignored the operations of the financial system and in particular the role of banks”.
Market fundamentalism understood itself as the diametric opposite of the communist command economy, but in fact made the same cardinal mistake: to believe that a rational model could encompass, predict and optimise the dynamic complexity of collective human behaviour. As Roman Frydman and Michael Goldberg write: “Like a socialist planner, the economist thus believes that he can accomplish great feats, because he supposes that he has finally uncovered the fully determined mechanism which drives market outcomes.”
Large parts of academic economics fell prey to what has been called physics envy, by analogy with the Freudian notion of penis envy. Like some other areas of social science, it aspired to the status, certainty and predictability of physics. I have long thought that this hubris was fed by the fact that economics, alone among the social sciences, has a Nobel prize. Strictly speaking, it is only the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, endowed by the Swedish central bank and first awarded in 1969, not one of the original Nobel prizes. But everyone calls it the Nobel prize. Moreover, politicians and decision-makers listen to economists in ways that they don’t, for example, listen to political scientists of the rational choice school that dominates many American university departments. This may partly be because a politician who practised rational choice politics would soon be kicked out of office, whereas the public has had to pick up the bill for those who practised rational choice economics.
This does not mean we should not pay attention to economists, nor that economics is unworthy of a Nobel prize. It just means it’s not a hard science like physics. Done properly, it takes account of culture, history, geography, institutions, individual and group psychology. John Stuart Mill said: “A man is not likely to be a good economist if he is nothing else,” and John Maynard Keynesobserved that an economist should be “mathematician, historian, statesman and philosopher in some degree”.
In another remarkable formulation, Keynes wrote: “Economics is essentially a moral science.” Indeed, one could argue that the Nobel prize for economics belongs somewhere midway between those for physics, literature and peace.Economics is, at best, a multidimensional, evidence-based craft, alert to all the influences on human behaviour, at once ambitious in scope and modest in its claims for what we can ever predict in human affairs.
What should follow from this revised, new-old understanding of the character and place of economics? I don’t know enough about university economics courses to say whether they need to adapt, but I was struck by a manifesto published a couple of years ago by economics students at Manchester University. This advocated an approach “that begins with economic phenomena and then gives students a toolkit to evaluate how well different perspectives can explain it”, rather than mathematical models based on unrealistic assumptions. (A colleague of mine claims to have heard a fierce argument between two economists in the common room of Nuffield College, Oxford, which culminated in one exclaiming to the other: “All right, assume immortality!”)
If economics is like other disciplines, it probably changes more slowly than it should, because of the strong inertial effect of older faculty personally invested in a certain way of doing the subject. Then there’s the conduct of major players, be they ministers, central bankers or business leaders. I recently read a splendidly robust lecture by the veteran investor Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s partner in Berkshire Hathaway, delivered in 2003, well before the crash. “Berkshire’s whole record has been achieved without paying one ounce of attention to the efficient market theory in its hard form,” he said, adding that the results of that efficient market doctrine in corporate finance “became even sillier than they were in the economics”.
Munger’s sage advice was to restore economics’ proper multidisciplinary character, not overweighting what can be counted against the unquantifiable, nor yielding to the craving for false precision, nor privileging theoretical macroeconomics over the real-life microeconomics that helped guide Berkshire’s long-term investment decisions.
We ordinary punters should learn the same lesson. We should ask of our economists, as of our doctors, only what they can deliver. There is a scientific component to medicine, larger than that in economics, but medical studies themselves indicate how much our health depends on other factors, especially psychological ones, and how much is still unknown. Economists are like doctors, only less so.
Thursday 4 February 2016
The age of deference to doctors and elites is over. Good riddance
Mary Dejevsky in The Independent
There was something about the story of five-year-old Ashya King that went beyond the plight of this one small, sick child, wrapped up in his blanket and connected to a drip. It was not just the public relations savvy of his family: the elaborate preparations for their flight, recorded and posted on the internet that drew such all-consuming public interest. Nor was it only the drama of the police chase across Europe, and the nights spent in a Spanish prison. It was much more.
There was a profound clash of principles here at a junction of extremes: a child with a terminal brain tumour, a fixed medical consensus, and parents who hoped, believed, there could be another way.
You probably remember – I certainly do – how forcefully Ashya’s father, Brett, argued his case. He had, he said, set about learning all he could about treatment possibilities for his son’s condition on the internet and in medical journals and concluded that a particular form of therapy was superior to the one being offered by the NHS.
Now, 18 months on, Ashya King’s story has a sequel beyond the so-far happy ending of his recovery announced last March. The sequel is that the treatment his family fought for so hard has indeed been found to be superior to that generally offered by the NHS, and in precisely the ways that the Kings had argued. A study published in The Lancet Oncology – an offshoot of The Lancet – concluded that the proton beam therapy, such as Ashya eventually obtained in Prague, was as effective as conventional radiotherapy, but less likely to cause damage to hearing, brain function and vital organs, especially in children.
In one way, that should perhaps come as no surprise, given King’s claim to have scoured the literature. There is also room for caution. This was a relatively small study conducted in the US. There was no control group – with children, this is deemed (rightly) to be unethical – and harmful side-effects were reduced, not eliminated. But such is the nature of medical research, and the treatment decisions based on it. Things are rarely cut and dried; it is more a balance of probability.
This may be one reason why the Lancet findings had less resonance than might have been expected, given the original hue and cry about Ashya’s case. But my cynical bet is that if the study had shown there was essentially no difference between the two treatments, or that proton beams were a quack therapy potentially hyped for commercial advantage, sections of the NHS establishment would have been out there day and night, warning parents who might be tempted to follow the Kings’ path how wrong-headed they were, and stressing how the doctors had been vindicated.
Instead, there were low-key interviews with select specialists, who noted that three NHS centres providing the therapy would be open by April 2018. Until then, those (few) children assessed as suitable for proton beam treatment would continue to go to the United States at public expense. (Why the US, rather than Prague or elsewhere in Europe, is not explained.)
It may just be my imagination, but I sensed an attempt to avoid reigniting the passions that had flared over Ashya’s treatment at the time, and especially not to raise other parents’ expectations. But I don’t think the controversy should be allowed to rest so easily. The King family’s experience raised serious questions about the practice of medicine in the UK and the attitudes of the professionals to their patients. And these latest research findings on proton therapy mean that it still does.
When Brett King presented his arguments, he did so not just with understandable emotion, but with enviable lucidity. He patently understood what he was talking about. This treatment was there; he wanted to give it a go, and he was prepared to raise the funds to pay for it. To the medics, he may well have come across as difficult, and there were those who genuinely felt that he was acting against the best interests of his son. In that case, the arguments should have gone to court – as they had done with eight-year-old Neon Roberts and his contested cancer treatment half a year before. That the Kings are Jehovah’s Witnesses may also have cued particular caution.
However, what many, especially in the medical establishment, seem reluctant to recognise is that change is afoot in relations between the professional elite and the rest – and not only because the so-called “age of deference” is dead.
Increasingly, it seems, we lay people are invited to make choices, only to be censured, or worse, for making the “wrong” one. Lawyers, for instance, will repeatedly tell you that they offer only advice; it is up to us to act on it, or not. So it is, increasingly, in the NHS.
There was something about the story of five-year-old Ashya King that went beyond the plight of this one small, sick child, wrapped up in his blanket and connected to a drip. It was not just the public relations savvy of his family: the elaborate preparations for their flight, recorded and posted on the internet that drew such all-consuming public interest. Nor was it only the drama of the police chase across Europe, and the nights spent in a Spanish prison. It was much more.
There was a profound clash of principles here at a junction of extremes: a child with a terminal brain tumour, a fixed medical consensus, and parents who hoped, believed, there could be another way.
You probably remember – I certainly do – how forcefully Ashya’s father, Brett, argued his case. He had, he said, set about learning all he could about treatment possibilities for his son’s condition on the internet and in medical journals and concluded that a particular form of therapy was superior to the one being offered by the NHS.
Now, 18 months on, Ashya King’s story has a sequel beyond the so-far happy ending of his recovery announced last March. The sequel is that the treatment his family fought for so hard has indeed been found to be superior to that generally offered by the NHS, and in precisely the ways that the Kings had argued. A study published in The Lancet Oncology – an offshoot of The Lancet – concluded that the proton beam therapy, such as Ashya eventually obtained in Prague, was as effective as conventional radiotherapy, but less likely to cause damage to hearing, brain function and vital organs, especially in children.
In one way, that should perhaps come as no surprise, given King’s claim to have scoured the literature. There is also room for caution. This was a relatively small study conducted in the US. There was no control group – with children, this is deemed (rightly) to be unethical – and harmful side-effects were reduced, not eliminated. But such is the nature of medical research, and the treatment decisions based on it. Things are rarely cut and dried; it is more a balance of probability.
This may be one reason why the Lancet findings had less resonance than might have been expected, given the original hue and cry about Ashya’s case. But my cynical bet is that if the study had shown there was essentially no difference between the two treatments, or that proton beams were a quack therapy potentially hyped for commercial advantage, sections of the NHS establishment would have been out there day and night, warning parents who might be tempted to follow the Kings’ path how wrong-headed they were, and stressing how the doctors had been vindicated.
Instead, there were low-key interviews with select specialists, who noted that three NHS centres providing the therapy would be open by April 2018. Until then, those (few) children assessed as suitable for proton beam treatment would continue to go to the United States at public expense. (Why the US, rather than Prague or elsewhere in Europe, is not explained.)
It may just be my imagination, but I sensed an attempt to avoid reigniting the passions that had flared over Ashya’s treatment at the time, and especially not to raise other parents’ expectations. But I don’t think the controversy should be allowed to rest so easily. The King family’s experience raised serious questions about the practice of medicine in the UK and the attitudes of the professionals to their patients. And these latest research findings on proton therapy mean that it still does.
When Brett King presented his arguments, he did so not just with understandable emotion, but with enviable lucidity. He patently understood what he was talking about. This treatment was there; he wanted to give it a go, and he was prepared to raise the funds to pay for it. To the medics, he may well have come across as difficult, and there were those who genuinely felt that he was acting against the best interests of his son. In that case, the arguments should have gone to court – as they had done with eight-year-old Neon Roberts and his contested cancer treatment half a year before. That the Kings are Jehovah’s Witnesses may also have cued particular caution.
However, what many, especially in the medical establishment, seem reluctant to recognise is that change is afoot in relations between the professional elite and the rest – and not only because the so-called “age of deference” is dead.
Increasingly, it seems, we lay people are invited to make choices, only to be censured, or worse, for making the “wrong” one. Lawyers, for instance, will repeatedly tell you that they offer only advice; it is up to us to act on it, or not. So it is, increasingly, in the NHS.
In theory, you can choose your GP, your hospital, your consultant – and, within reason, your treatment. In practice, it is more complicated. You may live too far away, the professionals may try to protect their patch, and the actual consultant is not there.
In the crucial matter of information, however, things have been evening up. The internet-nerd who turns up at the GP surgery convinced he is mortally ill may be a time-consuming nuisance, but such self-interested diligence can also help to point a time-strapped GP in the right direction. Not all are hypochondriacs. Patients may have more time and motive to research new treatments than their doctor. We old-fashioned scribes may have misgivings about the rise of citizen-journalism. But not all challenges to professional expertise are ignorant – or wrong.
In the case of Ashya King, everyone behaved questionably, even as they genuinely believed they were acting in the child’s very best interests.
But the days when the professionals – for all their years of training – had the field to themselves are gone. In medicine, we lay people are getting used to that. Are they?
In the crucial matter of information, however, things have been evening up. The internet-nerd who turns up at the GP surgery convinced he is mortally ill may be a time-consuming nuisance, but such self-interested diligence can also help to point a time-strapped GP in the right direction. Not all are hypochondriacs. Patients may have more time and motive to research new treatments than their doctor. We old-fashioned scribes may have misgivings about the rise of citizen-journalism. But not all challenges to professional expertise are ignorant – or wrong.
In the case of Ashya King, everyone behaved questionably, even as they genuinely believed they were acting in the child’s very best interests.
But the days when the professionals – for all their years of training – had the field to themselves are gone. In medicine, we lay people are getting used to that. Are they?
Wednesday 28 October 2015
To Beef or not to Beef - A Personal View on the Beef Crisis in India
By Girish Menon
Photo courtesy: Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism
Photo courtesy: Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism
I come from a Hindu family from Kerala. Our diet used to be pre-dominantly vegetarian by tradition and choice, though some men folk indulged in the pleasures of animal flesh whenever they wished to give themselves 'a treat' (usually accompanied by alcohol). I studied in a Catholic school in Mumbai with UP Brahmins as my teachers of Sanskritised Hindi. My first conflict with beef arose when Mr. Tiwari mentioned in class that Hindus do not eat beef while only a few days earlier my father had cooked some beef at home for the two of us to eat.
Historically, beef eating has been used as a primary ritual in the conversion of a Hindu to Islam. I'm not sure if the early Christian missionaries indulged in
similar Hindu iconoclasm? Hence, I can understand why banning beef has become a major
issue in the first predominantly upper class Hindu Indian government.
In Britain
where animal meat is the staple food of most residents there was recently a
great display of revulsion when horse meat was found to enter the food supply.
Britons have also been critical of the Koreans who love to eat dog meat. And
human meat is still frowned upon. Using the market mantra isn't this
totalitarian view depriving lovers of unusual meats a chance to improve their
own welfare?
In my view, beef will become the next Babri Masjid of modern
India .
Its ban will be essential for Hindus to prove that they have exorcised yet another ghost from the past (how many more ghosts do they wish to exorcise?).
So, what will happen to the Taslima's orphaned cows and to beef lovers like me? The orphaned cows will meet the same fate as the Indian poor - who cares!. As for beef loving Hindus like me, I could get a permit to eat beef for health reasons (theDubai
model). For those who cannot afford the high price of a permit, the Gujarat model on alcohol could be also be successfully
replicated. Go to the police station for a portion of beef!
So, what will happen to the Taslima's orphaned cows and to beef lovers like me? The orphaned cows will meet the same fate as the Indian poor - who cares!. As for beef loving Hindus like me, I could get a permit to eat beef for health reasons (the
Thursday 22 October 2015
Why too much choice is stressing us out
Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian
Once upon a time in Springfield, the Simpson family visited a new supermarket. Monstromart’s slogan was “where shopping is a baffling ordeal”. Product choice was unlimited, shelving reached the ceiling, nutmeg came in 12lb boxes and the express checkout had a sign reading, “1,000 items or less”. In the end the Simpsons returned to Apu’s Kwik-E-Mart.
In doing so, the Simpsons were making a choice to reduce their choice. It wasn’t quite a rational choice, but it made sense. In the parlance of economic theory, they were not rational utility maximisers but, in Herbert Simon’s term, “satisficers” – opting for what was good enough, rather than becoming confused to the point of inertia in front of Monstromart’s ranges of products.
This comes to mind because Tesco chief executive Dave Lewis seems bent on making shopping in his stores less baffling than it used to be. Earlier this year, he decided to scrap 30,000 of the 90,000 products from Tesco’s shelves. This was, in part, a response to the growing market shares of Aldi and Lidl, which only offer between 2,000 and 3,000 lines. For instance, Tesco used to offer 28 tomato ketchups while in Aldi there is just one in one size; Tesco offered 224 kinds of air freshener, Aldi only 12 – which, to my mind, is still at least 11 too many.
Now Lewis is doing something else to make shopping less of an ordeal and thereby, he hopes, reducing Tesco’s calamitous losses. He has introduced a trial in 50 stores to make it easier and quicker to shop for the ingredients for meals. Basmati rice next to Indian sauces, tinned tomatoes next to pasta.
What Lewis is doing to Tesco is revolutionary. Not just because he recognises that customers are time constrained, but because he realises that increased choice can be bad for you and, worse, result in losses that upset his shareholders.
Scrapping 30,000 products ... Tesco chief executive Dave Lewis is streamlining the supermarket experience. Photograph: Neil Hall/Reuters
But the idea that choice is bad for us flies in the face of what we’ve been told for decades. The standard line is that choice is good for us, that it confers on us freedom, personal responsibility, self-determination, autonomy and lots of other things that don’t help when you’re standing before a towering aisle of water bottles, paralysed and increasingly dehydrated, unable to choose. That wasn’t how endless choice was supposed to work, argues American psychologist and professor of social theory Barry Schwartz in his book The Paradox of Choice. “If we’re rational, [social scientists] tell us, added options can only make us better off as a society. This view is logically compelling, but empirically it isn’t true.”
Consider posh jams. In one study cited by Schwartz, researchers set up two displays of jams at a gourmet food store for customers to try samples, who were given a coupon for a dollar off if they bought a jar. In one display there were six jams, in the other 24: 30% of people exposed to the smaller selection bought a jam, but only 3% of those exposed to the larger selection did.
Now consider – and there’s no easy way to say this – your pension options. Schwartz found that a friend’s accounting firm was offering 156 different retirement plans. Schwartz noted that there was a shift of responsibilities from employer to employee in this seemingly benign transfer of choice: “When the employer is providing only a few routes to retirement security, it seems important to take responsibility for the quality of those routes. But when the employer takes the trouble to provide many routes, then it seems reasonable to think that the employer has done his or her part. Choosing wisely among those options becomes the employees’s responsibility.”
Posh jam conundrum ... too many options can be baffling. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian
But that’s the problem. Which of us, really, feels competent to choose between 156 varieties of pension plan? Who wouldn’t rather choose to lie in a bath of biscuits playing Minecraft? And yet, at the same time, we are certain that making a decision about our workplace pensions is an important one to get right. But instead of making that choice, Schwartz says, many defer it endlessly. One of his colleagues got access to the records of Vanguard, a gigantic mutual-fund company, and found that for every 10 mutual funds the employer offered, rate of participation went down 2% – even though by not participating, employees were passing up as much as $5,000 a year from the employer who would happily match their contribution.
But even if we do make a choice, Schwartz argues, “we end up less satisfied with the result of the choice than we would be if we had fewer options to choose from”. When there are lots of alternatives to consider, it is easy to imagine the attractive features of alternatives that you reject that make you less satisfied with the alternative that you’ve chosen.
Increased choice, then, can make us miserable because of regret, self-blame and opportunity costs. Worse, increased choice has created a new problem: the escalation in expectations. Consider jeans. Once there was only one kind, says Schwartz – the ill-fitting sort that, fingers-crossed, would get less ill-fitting once he wore and washed them repeatedly. Now, what with all the options (stone-washed, straight-leg, boot-fit, distressed, zip fly, button fly, slightly distressed, very distressed, knee-holed, thigh-holed, knee and thigh-holed, pretty much all holes and negligible denim), Schwartz feels entitled to expect that there is a perfect pair of jeans for him. Inevitably, though, when he leaves the store, he is likely to be less satisfied now than when there were hardly any options.
In the good old days there was just one kind of jeans ... Photograph: Ben Margot/AP
Schwartz’s suggestion is that, at a certain point, choice shifts from having a positive relationship with happiness to an inverse one. So, what’s the answer? “The secret to happiness is low expectations,” he says, sensibly.
No wonder, then, we aren’t happy. In the 10 years since Schwartz wrote his book, the ideology of unlimited choice has expanded into unlikely areas – schools, sex, parenting, TV – and expectations have risen as a result. Equally importantly, new tactics have developed to help consumers deal with the downsides of choice. For instance, Schwartz notes, there is an increasing reliance on recommendation engines to help people cope with choice. “The internet hath created a problem that it is now trying to solve,” he says.
One of the areas affected is dating. Relationships are being treated like any other product – online we can browse and compare prospective sexual partners.
“I think dating sites are now the most common path for meeting romantic partners, and the overwhelming amount of choice that dating sites have created is a real problem,” says Schwartz. One of those problems was noted by the comedian Aziz Ansari in his book Modern Romance. In it, a woman recounts meeting a man on the dating app Tinder, then spending the journey to their first date swiping through the service to see if anyone better was available. Failure to commit to a date or a relationship can itself be a choice – indeed, the sociology professor who helped Ansari with his book, Eric Klinenberg, wrote Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone to account for those who have stepped off the treadmill of dating, the nightmare of having more choice but less reason to choose. Hence, too, Japan’s soshoku danshi or herbivore men who, so corrupted by the endless choices offered by online pornography, are no longer interested in real sex or romantic relationships. Psychologist Philip Zimbardo fears that, thanks to how online pornography is offering more choices for masturbatory satisfactions, becoming more interactive and immersive, choosing real-life romantic relationships will become even less appealing.
BT vying with Sky for football coverage is good news, right? Not necessarily ... Photograph: Rex Shutterstock
There’s another problem with choice: it can be more apparent than real – that is, a seeming increase in choice masks the fact that you’re paying more for the same stuff you had before. My Guardian colleague Barney Ronay identified this when he considered football on TV recently. The ostensibly good news is that BT Sport is competing with Sky for football rights. It now exclusively shows European Champions League football, which should mean more choice, lower customer outlay and more joy, shouldn’t it? But if you are already a Sky Sports subscriber (or, perhaps more pertiniently, watched the free-to-air games on ITV), it means the opposite. If Barney wants to watch the same amount of football as last year, he will now have to pay more.
That sort of phenomenon repeats itself across TV more generally. To watch all the good stuff on TV now involves paying money in the form of monthly subscriptions to Amazon Prime, Netflix, Sky, BT and Blinkbox, as well as having a Freeview box. But who can afford that kind of outlay? A decade ago everything you could ever wish to watch was on Sky (if you were prepared, admittedly, to pay a monthly subscription to Murdoch). A decade before that, all good TV was on terrestrial, so once you had paid for the telly and the licence you were set. What is sold to us as increased choice has thus made us poorer and, if Ronay’s experience is anything to go by, more disappointed. As Ronay says: “for the captive consumer this isn’t really a proper choice at all, but an opportunity to spend the same and get less, or alternatively spend more and get the same.”
UK TV: how much does it cost to watch everything?
Anger at this state of affairs is comprehensible to anyone who lives in an advanced western society in 2015 and has to choose between mobile phone plans, schools, and water, gas and electricity suppliers – not to mention minimally distinguishable prospective dates. Admittedly these are the choices typical of decadent westerners in the era of late capitalism, but that thought doesn’t make the burden of choice any easier to bear.
Consider electricity, says Professor Renata Salecl, author of The Tyranny of Choice. “Privatisation of electricity did not bring the desired outcome – lesser prices, better service – however, it did contribute to the anxiety and feeling of guilt on the side of the consumers. We feel that it is our fault we are paying too much and we are anxious that a better deal is just around the corner. However, while we are losing valuable time doing research on which provider to choose, we then stop short of actually making the choice.”
So we do nothing, and corporations profit from this inertia.
All of this confounds the idea that human beings act in such a way that they maximise their wellbeing and minimise their pain. “People often act against their wellbeing. They also rarely make choices in a rational way.”
The political idea of allowing parents to choose between schools was to apply the presumed rigour of the market to education so that underperforming schools would improve or close. Standards would rise and formerly illiterate brats in key stage II would relax after double quantum physics by dancing around the maypole singing settings of Horace’s verse in Latin, just like in Michael Gove’s dreams.
Education has become a consumer good, and could all go wrong ... Illustration from Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist. Mansell/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images
Challenging the rhetoric of choice ... Jeremy Corbyn. Photograph: Mary Turner/Getty Images
In 2015, though, there are counter-tendencies to the stress-inducing extension of choice. Not only is Tesco reducing its number of products, but the new leader of the Labour party has just been elected on a political platform that, in part, challenges the rhetoric of choice. Jeremy Corbyn proposes to renationalise not just the rail network but public utilities (gas, electricity and water), partly in the hope that the reduction of choice will provide a fairer, less anxiety-inducing experience for their users.
Perhaps, Corbyn’s political philosophy suggests, what we need is not more choice, but less; not more competition but more monopolies. But before you counter with something along the lines of “Why don’t you go and live in North Korea, pinko?” consider this: Paypal founder Peter Thiel argues that monopolies are good things and that competition, often, doesn’t help either businesses or customers. “In the real world outside economic theory, every business is successful exactly to the extent that it does something others cannot. Monopoly is therefore not a pathology or an exception. Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.” Competition, in short, is for losers.
That, of course, doesn’t mean that successful capitalists like Thiel would be supporting Corbyn in his plan to recreate the state monopolies of yore or submit schools once more to local education control, but it does mean the rhetoric of choice and competition is at least being challenged and not only from the political left.
“At least we are talking about a political and economic choice,” says Salecl, “and are not simply following the ‘desires’ of the market.” Perhaps: if she’s right about that, then we are opting for something we haven’t done for a long time.
Once upon a time in Springfield, the Simpson family visited a new supermarket. Monstromart’s slogan was “where shopping is a baffling ordeal”. Product choice was unlimited, shelving reached the ceiling, nutmeg came in 12lb boxes and the express checkout had a sign reading, “1,000 items or less”. In the end the Simpsons returned to Apu’s Kwik-E-Mart.
In doing so, the Simpsons were making a choice to reduce their choice. It wasn’t quite a rational choice, but it made sense. In the parlance of economic theory, they were not rational utility maximisers but, in Herbert Simon’s term, “satisficers” – opting for what was good enough, rather than becoming confused to the point of inertia in front of Monstromart’s ranges of products.
This comes to mind because Tesco chief executive Dave Lewis seems bent on making shopping in his stores less baffling than it used to be. Earlier this year, he decided to scrap 30,000 of the 90,000 products from Tesco’s shelves. This was, in part, a response to the growing market shares of Aldi and Lidl, which only offer between 2,000 and 3,000 lines. For instance, Tesco used to offer 28 tomato ketchups while in Aldi there is just one in one size; Tesco offered 224 kinds of air freshener, Aldi only 12 – which, to my mind, is still at least 11 too many.
Now Lewis is doing something else to make shopping less of an ordeal and thereby, he hopes, reducing Tesco’s calamitous losses. He has introduced a trial in 50 stores to make it easier and quicker to shop for the ingredients for meals. Basmati rice next to Indian sauces, tinned tomatoes next to pasta.
What Lewis is doing to Tesco is revolutionary. Not just because he recognises that customers are time constrained, but because he realises that increased choice can be bad for you and, worse, result in losses that upset his shareholders.
Scrapping 30,000 products ... Tesco chief executive Dave Lewis is streamlining the supermarket experience. Photograph: Neil Hall/Reuters
But the idea that choice is bad for us flies in the face of what we’ve been told for decades. The standard line is that choice is good for us, that it confers on us freedom, personal responsibility, self-determination, autonomy and lots of other things that don’t help when you’re standing before a towering aisle of water bottles, paralysed and increasingly dehydrated, unable to choose. That wasn’t how endless choice was supposed to work, argues American psychologist and professor of social theory Barry Schwartz in his book The Paradox of Choice. “If we’re rational, [social scientists] tell us, added options can only make us better off as a society. This view is logically compelling, but empirically it isn’t true.”
Consider posh jams. In one study cited by Schwartz, researchers set up two displays of jams at a gourmet food store for customers to try samples, who were given a coupon for a dollar off if they bought a jar. In one display there were six jams, in the other 24: 30% of people exposed to the smaller selection bought a jam, but only 3% of those exposed to the larger selection did.
Now consider – and there’s no easy way to say this – your pension options. Schwartz found that a friend’s accounting firm was offering 156 different retirement plans. Schwartz noted that there was a shift of responsibilities from employer to employee in this seemingly benign transfer of choice: “When the employer is providing only a few routes to retirement security, it seems important to take responsibility for the quality of those routes. But when the employer takes the trouble to provide many routes, then it seems reasonable to think that the employer has done his or her part. Choosing wisely among those options becomes the employees’s responsibility.”
Posh jam conundrum ... too many options can be baffling. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian
But that’s the problem. Which of us, really, feels competent to choose between 156 varieties of pension plan? Who wouldn’t rather choose to lie in a bath of biscuits playing Minecraft? And yet, at the same time, we are certain that making a decision about our workplace pensions is an important one to get right. But instead of making that choice, Schwartz says, many defer it endlessly. One of his colleagues got access to the records of Vanguard, a gigantic mutual-fund company, and found that for every 10 mutual funds the employer offered, rate of participation went down 2% – even though by not participating, employees were passing up as much as $5,000 a year from the employer who would happily match their contribution.
But even if we do make a choice, Schwartz argues, “we end up less satisfied with the result of the choice than we would be if we had fewer options to choose from”. When there are lots of alternatives to consider, it is easy to imagine the attractive features of alternatives that you reject that make you less satisfied with the alternative that you’ve chosen.
Increased choice, then, can make us miserable because of regret, self-blame and opportunity costs. Worse, increased choice has created a new problem: the escalation in expectations. Consider jeans. Once there was only one kind, says Schwartz – the ill-fitting sort that, fingers-crossed, would get less ill-fitting once he wore and washed them repeatedly. Now, what with all the options (stone-washed, straight-leg, boot-fit, distressed, zip fly, button fly, slightly distressed, very distressed, knee-holed, thigh-holed, knee and thigh-holed, pretty much all holes and negligible denim), Schwartz feels entitled to expect that there is a perfect pair of jeans for him. Inevitably, though, when he leaves the store, he is likely to be less satisfied now than when there were hardly any options.
In the good old days there was just one kind of jeans ... Photograph: Ben Margot/AP
Schwartz’s suggestion is that, at a certain point, choice shifts from having a positive relationship with happiness to an inverse one. So, what’s the answer? “The secret to happiness is low expectations,” he says, sensibly.
No wonder, then, we aren’t happy. In the 10 years since Schwartz wrote his book, the ideology of unlimited choice has expanded into unlikely areas – schools, sex, parenting, TV – and expectations have risen as a result. Equally importantly, new tactics have developed to help consumers deal with the downsides of choice. For instance, Schwartz notes, there is an increasing reliance on recommendation engines to help people cope with choice. “The internet hath created a problem that it is now trying to solve,” he says.
One of the areas affected is dating. Relationships are being treated like any other product – online we can browse and compare prospective sexual partners.
“I think dating sites are now the most common path for meeting romantic partners, and the overwhelming amount of choice that dating sites have created is a real problem,” says Schwartz. One of those problems was noted by the comedian Aziz Ansari in his book Modern Romance. In it, a woman recounts meeting a man on the dating app Tinder, then spending the journey to their first date swiping through the service to see if anyone better was available. Failure to commit to a date or a relationship can itself be a choice – indeed, the sociology professor who helped Ansari with his book, Eric Klinenberg, wrote Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone to account for those who have stepped off the treadmill of dating, the nightmare of having more choice but less reason to choose. Hence, too, Japan’s soshoku danshi or herbivore men who, so corrupted by the endless choices offered by online pornography, are no longer interested in real sex or romantic relationships. Psychologist Philip Zimbardo fears that, thanks to how online pornography is offering more choices for masturbatory satisfactions, becoming more interactive and immersive, choosing real-life romantic relationships will become even less appealing.
BT vying with Sky for football coverage is good news, right? Not necessarily ... Photograph: Rex Shutterstock
There’s another problem with choice: it can be more apparent than real – that is, a seeming increase in choice masks the fact that you’re paying more for the same stuff you had before. My Guardian colleague Barney Ronay identified this when he considered football on TV recently. The ostensibly good news is that BT Sport is competing with Sky for football rights. It now exclusively shows European Champions League football, which should mean more choice, lower customer outlay and more joy, shouldn’t it? But if you are already a Sky Sports subscriber (or, perhaps more pertiniently, watched the free-to-air games on ITV), it means the opposite. If Barney wants to watch the same amount of football as last year, he will now have to pay more.
That sort of phenomenon repeats itself across TV more generally. To watch all the good stuff on TV now involves paying money in the form of monthly subscriptions to Amazon Prime, Netflix, Sky, BT and Blinkbox, as well as having a Freeview box. But who can afford that kind of outlay? A decade ago everything you could ever wish to watch was on Sky (if you were prepared, admittedly, to pay a monthly subscription to Murdoch). A decade before that, all good TV was on terrestrial, so once you had paid for the telly and the licence you were set. What is sold to us as increased choice has thus made us poorer and, if Ronay’s experience is anything to go by, more disappointed. As Ronay says: “for the captive consumer this isn’t really a proper choice at all, but an opportunity to spend the same and get less, or alternatively spend more and get the same.”
UK TV: how much does it cost to watch everything?
Anger at this state of affairs is comprehensible to anyone who lives in an advanced western society in 2015 and has to choose between mobile phone plans, schools, and water, gas and electricity suppliers – not to mention minimally distinguishable prospective dates. Admittedly these are the choices typical of decadent westerners in the era of late capitalism, but that thought doesn’t make the burden of choice any easier to bear.
Consider electricity, says Professor Renata Salecl, author of The Tyranny of Choice. “Privatisation of electricity did not bring the desired outcome – lesser prices, better service – however, it did contribute to the anxiety and feeling of guilt on the side of the consumers. We feel that it is our fault we are paying too much and we are anxious that a better deal is just around the corner. However, while we are losing valuable time doing research on which provider to choose, we then stop short of actually making the choice.”
So we do nothing, and corporations profit from this inertia.
All of this confounds the idea that human beings act in such a way that they maximise their wellbeing and minimise their pain. “People often act against their wellbeing. They also rarely make choices in a rational way.”
The political idea of allowing parents to choose between schools was to apply the presumed rigour of the market to education so that underperforming schools would improve or close. Standards would rise and formerly illiterate brats in key stage II would relax after double quantum physics by dancing around the maypole singing settings of Horace’s verse in Latin, just like in Michael Gove’s dreams.
Education has become a consumer good, and could all go wrong ... Illustration from Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist. Mansell/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images
So education has become a consumer good, and my daughter’s is something I’m encouraged to think about as though it were a trip to the shops to buy shoes. Can I buy the best education for my daughter, possibly by moving house, lying about my real address or selling a kidney for private schooling? I’m not sure, but one thing I am becoming increasingly convinced of is what Salecl says: “Ideology that convinces us that everyone can make it if only he or she makes the right choice relies on blindness – we do not see that social constraints stop us making out of our lives what we wish for. And when we think about choice as a primarily individual matter, we also become blind about broader social, political choices.”
What she means, I think, is that the ideology of choice makes us forget that some things shouldn’t be bought and sold, and they are the most important things of all. What’s more, having made a decision, we don’t want to hear we have got our choices wrong. “We are constantly under the impression that life choices we made after careful planning should bring us expected results – happiness, security, contentment – and that with better choices, traumatic feelings that we have when dealing with loss, risk and uncertainty can be avoided.” No wonder, then, that Slacel’s most recent work is on the power of denial and ignorance. “When people are overwhelmed by choice and when they are anxious about it, they often turn to denial, ignorance and wilful blindness.”
Schwartz demurs, arguing that some extensions of choice can be a good thing. When I tell him about the preponderance of academies and free schools that, seemingly, increase choice for British parents, he says a similar phenomenon, charter schools, has arisen in the US. “There is something good about this, since public education in much of the US is dreadful, and competition might make it better. But there is no doubt it is stressing parents out big time.”
As with choosing a pension, choosing a school leaves scope for regret, shame and fear of missing out. And, in extremis, the terrifying sense that I might inadvertently choose an option that will mess up my daughter’s future.
What she means, I think, is that the ideology of choice makes us forget that some things shouldn’t be bought and sold, and they are the most important things of all. What’s more, having made a decision, we don’t want to hear we have got our choices wrong. “We are constantly under the impression that life choices we made after careful planning should bring us expected results – happiness, security, contentment – and that with better choices, traumatic feelings that we have when dealing with loss, risk and uncertainty can be avoided.” No wonder, then, that Slacel’s most recent work is on the power of denial and ignorance. “When people are overwhelmed by choice and when they are anxious about it, they often turn to denial, ignorance and wilful blindness.”
Schwartz demurs, arguing that some extensions of choice can be a good thing. When I tell him about the preponderance of academies and free schools that, seemingly, increase choice for British parents, he says a similar phenomenon, charter schools, has arisen in the US. “There is something good about this, since public education in much of the US is dreadful, and competition might make it better. But there is no doubt it is stressing parents out big time.”
As with choosing a pension, choosing a school leaves scope for regret, shame and fear of missing out. And, in extremis, the terrifying sense that I might inadvertently choose an option that will mess up my daughter’s future.
Challenging the rhetoric of choice ... Jeremy Corbyn. Photograph: Mary Turner/Getty Images
In 2015, though, there are counter-tendencies to the stress-inducing extension of choice. Not only is Tesco reducing its number of products, but the new leader of the Labour party has just been elected on a political platform that, in part, challenges the rhetoric of choice. Jeremy Corbyn proposes to renationalise not just the rail network but public utilities (gas, electricity and water), partly in the hope that the reduction of choice will provide a fairer, less anxiety-inducing experience for their users.
Perhaps, Corbyn’s political philosophy suggests, what we need is not more choice, but less; not more competition but more monopolies. But before you counter with something along the lines of “Why don’t you go and live in North Korea, pinko?” consider this: Paypal founder Peter Thiel argues that monopolies are good things and that competition, often, doesn’t help either businesses or customers. “In the real world outside economic theory, every business is successful exactly to the extent that it does something others cannot. Monopoly is therefore not a pathology or an exception. Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.” Competition, in short, is for losers.
That, of course, doesn’t mean that successful capitalists like Thiel would be supporting Corbyn in his plan to recreate the state monopolies of yore or submit schools once more to local education control, but it does mean the rhetoric of choice and competition is at least being challenged and not only from the political left.
“At least we are talking about a political and economic choice,” says Salecl, “and are not simply following the ‘desires’ of the market.” Perhaps: if she’s right about that, then we are opting for something we haven’t done for a long time.
Tuesday 19 May 2015
Why I choose to have less choice
Shopping around is the mantra of the modern era. But who really benefits from our befuddlement?
Tim Lott in The Guardian
Tim Lott in The Guardian
Once, when I was suffering a fit of depression, I walked into a supermarket to buy a packet of washing powder. Confronted by a shelf full of different possibilities, I stood there for 15 minutes staring at them, then walked out without buying any washing powder at all.
I still feel echoes of that sensation of helplessness. If I just want to buy one item but discover that if I buy three of the items I will save myself half the item price, I find myself assailed by choice paralysis.
I hate making consumer choices at the best of times, because I have this uncomfortable suspicion that big companies are trying to gull me out of as much money as possible, using sophisticated techniques designed by people who are smarter than I am.
For instance, when I buy an insurance product, how can I decide whether I should just buy the cheapest, or the best? The best is the one most likely to pay out without penalty or fuss, but that information is much harder to find out than factors such as cost, extent of cover, etc. It’s complicated. So I often try not to make choices – by just putting my payments for insurance with my usual insurers on direct debit, for example, which means I don’t have to think about shopping around.
This issue of choice and complexity lies at the heart of the experience of being modern. It penetrates commerce, politics and our personal lives. It may even be connected to the fact that there are higher levels of depression in society than ever before.
This idea was suggested by Barry Schwartz in his book The Paradox of Choice. Choice oppresses us. Why? Because there are too many choices and they are often too complex for us to be confident that we are making the right one.
When you might have 200 potential choices to make of a particular style of camera, it is difficult to feel sure you have chosen the right one – even if you spend an inordinate amount of time trying to make a rational decision. Or you may see the same model two weeks after you’ve bought it being sold more cheaply. When there was less choice and fewer types of camera, this kind of experience was rare. Our capacity for hindsight has become a means of punishing ourselves.
Complexity is not entirely accidental. Late capitalism solves the dilemma of competition (for the producer) through complexity. To try to choose a mortgage, or a pension, or a computer, requires a tremendous amount of application, so we become relatively easy to gull. Whether it is a power company or a loan company, we struggle to understand tariffs, terms and the small print. Exhausted, we just take a stab and hope for the best, or we succumb to inertia; choose what we have always chosen. Consumers are thrown back on simple cues that are advantageous to the producers, such as brand recognition.
Complexity also impacts on politics. Once it was pretty clear who to vote for – your class position, on the whole, made it a simple matter of self-interest for most voters. Now we have become closer to what is ironically the democratic ideal – ie choice-making actors – voting is more of a challenge than it once was. Do you really have a good enough grasp of economic theory to judge whether it is best to spend or save in a recession? Do you understand the complexities of private provision in the NHS enough to rule it out? Do you know enough about international affairs to support a reduction in defence spending, or a retreat from the EU? Most people don’t – so, again, they make snap judgments based on loyalty and sentiment.
This problem of choice and complexity is ubiquitous. It applies in medicine. If I am ill and asked to make a choice about treatment, I would often rather leave the choice to the doctor, if only because if the wrong choice is made, I am not going to feel nearly so bad about it. I had a prostate cancer scare recently, and I just wanted to be told what to do – not decide whether, say, I should choose an operation that would guarantee impotency in order to stave off a 5% chance of cancer. The burden of choice was too big.
In the field of education a similar dilemma applies. Once your child went to the local primary or secondary. Now you have to decide from a bewildering number of types of school. In the personal realm, once, you stayed married for life. Now, if you are in an unhappy marriage you have to decide whether to stay or not. These may be all positive developments, but they come at a cost – the potential for regret.
So how should one react to complexity? Schwartz suggests we should limit choice, not extend it. If you are shopping for food, go to supermarkets that are priced simply with a limited range, such as Aldi and Lidl. Recognise and accept complexity – which means accepting that you can never be sure that you’ve made the right choice.
Above all, don’t fall for the old trope of only wanting “the best”. Schwartz calls such people “maximisers” – people who are never happy, because they have expectations that can never be met, since in a world of complexity and unlimited choice there is always a better option. Be a “satisficer” instead – people who are happy to say “that’s good enough”, or “it’ll do”.
This may not work in politics – saying the Conservatives “will do” when you wanted the Green party is not very satisfactory – but as a consumer, and in life generally, it’s a pretty good formula. It’ll do, anyway.
Saturday 21 March 2015
As a Muslim woman, I see the veil as a rejection of progressive values
Yasmin Alibhai Brown in The Guardian
‘In 1899 Qasim Amin warned that unless Muslims embraced modernity and equality, the future would be bleak. We are in that bleakness now.’ Illustration by Noma Bar
It could be a millenarian crisis or a delayed reaction to decades of bad history, but millions of Muslims seem to have turned inwards, hankering for an imagined golden age. They are contemptuous of modernity’s bendable, ductile values. Some are drawn to reactionary dogma, and preachers while a good number have thrown themselves into political Islam to resist and combat western hegemonies – or so the story goes.
As a practising (though flawed) Shia Muslim, I watch the new puritans with apprehension. So too other Muslims worldwide, the silent many, watch and tremble. From the eighth to the early 20th century, Muslims strove for a broad education (as commanded in the Qur’an), questioned doctrines, and were passionate about scientific advancements, political and social ideals and art. Not even humiliating colonial rule deterred them from the march forward. Now the marchers are walking backwards. The hijab, jilbab, burqa and niqab are visible signs of this retreat from progressive values.
This article will divide people. Women I respect and like wear hijabs and jilbabs to articulate their faith and identity. Others do so to follow their dreams, to go into higher education or jobs. And an increasing number are making a political statement. I am not assuming that the coverings all represent simple oppression. What I am saying is that many women who take up the veil, in any of its forms, do so without delving fully into its implications, significance or history. Their choice, even if independently made, may not be fully examined.
Muslim feminists of the past critiqued and repudiated the veil. One of them was a man, Qasim Amin, an Egyptian judge and philosopher, who in 1899 wrote The Liberation of Women.He was the John Stuart Mill of the Arab world. Huda Shaarawi set up the Egyptian women’s union in the early 1920s. One day in 1923, as she disembarked from a train in Cairo, she threw off her veil and claimed her right to be visible. Educated Iranian women started feminist magazines and campaigned against the veil around the same time. These pioneers have been written out of history or are dismissed as western stooges by some contemporary Muslim intellectuals.
After the transformative 60s, Muslim feminists resumed the fight for equality. European rule was over. It was time. The Moroccan academic Fatema Mernissi, Egypt’s Nawal El Saadawi and the Pakistani scholar Riffat Hassan all argued for female emancipation. They rightly saw the veil as a a tool and symbol of oppression and subservience. Mernissi’s Beyond the Veil ( 1975) is a classic text. So too El Saadawi’s The Hidden Face of Eve (1975). But more conservative Islamic tenets have taken over lands, communities, families, heads and hearts.
The promise of this version is a return to certainties and “purity” of belief, a mission backed by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. Deobandi revivalists, funded by Arab money, now run more mosques in Britain than any other Muslim subgroup. Women are told not to travel without male relatives, not to work, to be subservient, to veil. This movement began as a reaction against the Indian raj and mutated into a fundamentalist creed. Today their pushback against “cultural imperialism” appeals to many alienated young Muslims. And, in part, it explains the growing popularity of the hijab, jilbab and full veil .
But in the Qur’an, the veil is mostly used metaphorically to describe barriers between good and bad, believers and nonbelievers. In two verses, women are told to lower their gaze, and to cover their private parts and bosoms. Men are also instructed to lower their gaze, and to dress modestly. One verse commands the women in the prophet’s family to fully veil, partly to protect them from enemies and supplicants.
Sahar Amer, associate professor at the University of North Carolina, has studied these sacred injunctions: “[Nowhere] is the hijab used to describe, let alone prescribe, the necessity for Muslim women to wear a headscarf or any other pieces of clothing often seen covering women in Islamic countries today. Even after reading those passages dealing with the female dress code, one continues to wonder what exactly the hijab is: is it a simple scarf? A purdah? A chador? Or something else? Which parts of the body exactly is it supposed to cover? Just the hair? The hair and neck? The arms? Hands? Feet? Face? Eyes?”
Veils, in truth, predate Islam. Zoroastrian and Byzantine upper-class ladies wore them to keep aloof from the hoi polloi. When Islam’s armies first reached Persia, they were shocked at this snobbery; then they adopted the custom they loathed; the control of women was hard-wired into their psyches.
All religions cast women as sinners and temptresses. Conservative Islam has revived the slander for our times. Women have to be sequestered or contained lest they raise male lust and cause public disorder. Some young Muslim women argue that veils liberate them from a modern culture that objectifies and sexualises females. That argument is appealing; but if credible, why would so many hijabis dress in tight jeans and clinging tops, and why would so many Muslim women flock to have liposuction or breast enhancements?
It is complicated: veils for me represent both religious arrogance and subjugation; they both desexualise and fervidly sexualise. Women are primarily seen as sexual creatures whose hair and bodies incite desire and disorder in the public space. The claim that veils protect women from lasciviousness and disrespect carries an element of self-deception. I have been at graduation ceremonies where shrouded female students have refused to shake the hand of the chancellor. Veiled women have provoked confrontations over their right to wear veils, in courts, at schools and in colleges and workplaces. But I regard their victories as a rejection of social compromise.
Of even more concern are young Muslim lives. Little girls are being asked to don hijabs and jilbabs, turned into sexual beings long before puberty. You can even buy stretchy baby hijabs with fake Calvin Klein and Versace logos.
Like a half-naked woman, a veiled female to me represents an affront to female dignity, autonomy and potential. Both are marionettes, and have internalised messages about femaleness. A woman in a full black cloak, her face and eyes masked walked near to where I was sitting in a park recently, but we could not speak. Behind fabric, she was more unapproachable than a fort. She had a baby girl in a pushchair. Her young son was running around. Will the girl be put into a hijab, then a jilbab? Will the son expect that of his sister and wife one day? To never have the sun warm your face, the breeze through your hair – is that what God wants? Whatever happened to sisterhood?
But do those who choose to veil think of women in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and even the west, who are prosecuted, flogged, tortured or killed for not complying? This is not a freestanding choice – it can’t be. Although we hear from vocal British hijabis and niqabis, those who are forced cannot speak out. A fully burqaed woman once turned up at my house, a graduate, covered in cuts, burns, bruises and bites. Do we know how many wounded, veiled women walk around hidden among us? Sexual violence in Saudi Arabia and Iran is appallingly high, as is body dysmorphia.
Liberalism is being tested by the new Islamic ardency. A French-style ban would be unwise and unjust. But institutions can apply dress codes. A bank worker cannot dress like a stripper; a child cannot wear a boob tube to school. Have rules and stick to them, within reason. In 1899, Qasim Amin warned that unless Muslims embraced modernity and equality, the future would be bleak. We are in that bleakness now, and few dare to speak up for its values.
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