When the same data are pored over many times, there is a danger we will find patterns that are there by accident. (R. Rajan)
1. Statistics today essentially serve lead our attention to subsidiary/secondary/lesser –not global and structural problems.
2. Statistics are too often used to avoid a debate about the mechanisms that produce inequities; they are elevated to the rank of objectives and/or made to serve an economic system that ignores human rights (HR).
3. There are loads of statistics, but very few about HR-as-a-social-product. Statistics are actually –more often than what you think– used for the reductionistic purposes of those in power; they thus have other ultimate goals than to inform; they may ultimately hide more than what they show –apart from the fact that they may be worth their weight in poor people’s misfortunes.
4. There is indeed an excess of data around, but a (most probably deliberate) lack of data about the social-ill-being-of-poor-and-marginalized-people. It is indeed rare that a link is made between health statistics, for example, and HR or social justice.
5. Conversely, statistics are used in the construction of fear about the menaces of poverty or of epidemics (since the rich are fearful of the diseases of the poor that they can catch). (CETIM)
6. In development work, statistics make visible only certain aspects of reality and thus lead to only certain practices. So is born a veritable culture of ignoring equity and HR issues and, at the same time, a distancing from the needed critique of the prevailing social, economic and political system.
7. This resulting reductionistic logic ultimately ignores (or makes invisible) the essential underlying social relations and thus substitutes for a comprehensive explanation of the phenomena observed. While ‘evidence-based-policy’ is touted as the catch phrase, there is a readiness to embark on such adventures without any evidence whatsoever. (PHM India)
8. The interpretation of reality as fragmented, overlooks the important connections and unequal relations that have become worse during the neoliberal period. Action is then centered around these fragments of reality that only lead to minor adjustments instead of acting on the profound transformation of the whole. [So you vaccinate children against the six major killer diseases, but do nothing to lift them out of malnutrition and poverty….so they die from a non-immunizable disease of poverty…: where is the ultimate logic?]
9. Such a vision –also called the ‘shish-kebab mentality’ in which the focus is on the morsels instead of on the skewer that holds them together– is convenient to the power holders and is often used as a tool to darken and make disappear the destructive impacts brought about by un unfair system (and the corporations that control it) that is destroying human lives and ecosystems; the fact that such actions are often ‘honest-and-well-intentioned’ (or born by ignorance of the big picture) matters little. (Jaime Breilh)
A note aside: Epidemiology is a prime generator and user of health statistics. But, statistics taking a passive view and a permissive logic towards the deterioration of poor people’s health, modern-day epidemiology does, in the end, very often play the game of private interests, not infrequently selling its services to enterprises or playing a role of mediator in the conflicts of labor and those relating to the environment. (J. Breilh)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
cschuftan@phmovement.org