We all know it for long, don’t we?
1. The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element of so-called democratic societies. Those who manipulate the unseen mechanisms of society constitute an invisible government. In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical [or HR thinking], we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind and policy decisions. (E. Bernays, 1928). This was written in 1928. These days it is not much different: Too often salami-sliced data-dredging dictates policy from spurious evidence. (John Ioannids)
2. Further consider:
• When statistics are not based on rigorous and truthful calculations, they lead us along the wrong path instead of pointing us in the right direction. (Alexis de Tocqueville, 1805-1859)
• Also, Mark Twain (1871-1910) had it right: There are lies, damn lies and then there are statistics.
• Actually, statistics can be used to mislead without lying, and they have the further advantage of being complicated.
• Countless organizations and individuals –not only some statisticians– use, and in some cases, manipulate data for some advantage, whether for politics, for prestige or for profit, or for all of the above.*
*: Being a statistician means never having to say you are certain. (Ron Laporte)
3. Do not take me wrong. I love numbers. They do allow us to get a sense of magnitude, to measure change, to put claims in context. But despite their bold and confident exterior, numbers are delicate things and that is why it is upsetting when they are abused. As we know, politicians often meddle with statistics. Every statistician is familiar with the tedious “Lies, damned lies, and then there is statistics” tease. But this bad habit of some politicians is not so much about lying –since to lie means having some knowledge of the truth– as it is about bullshitting with a carefree disregard of whether the number is appropriate or not. (David Spiegelhalter)
The question is: Who is measuring the measurers?
4. Scores of people are surveyed to get ‘their’ opinions or priorities. But do they then organize as claim holder groups to demand pertinent changes? No –even if and when they are ever told the results… Surveys typically only come out with ‘suggested recommendations’ that, more often than not, do not help upsetting claim holders enough to move them into action.
5. Moreover, how often is data collected and used basically to ratify/quantify what claim holders already know empirically? To convince who? Do duty bearers learn something they did not already know or strongly suspected? The corollary here is that a difference could be made if quite a bit of survey and data collection moneys were instead used for community organization and mobilization for HR.
6. Ask yourself: Do indicators and data on them look at what is the truth or at what is important for top-down decisions? We know that “you find what you look for”. So, on top of misrepresenting reality, do data change certain realities? Even if they do not, it is actually the link between data and action what interests us in HR work –and this is, more often than not, neglected.
7. Too often, people and entire groups go uncounted for reasons of power: those without power are further marginalized by their exclusion from statistics, while elites resist the counting of their incomes and wealth. As a result, the actual pattern of counting can both reflect and exacerbate existing inequalities. (Alex Cobham)
8. It is part of the view of the-elites-as-measurers that the existence of vulnerable people is ‘unfortunate’, in good part due to myriad HR violations. But the attitudes, structures and practices that reproduce HR violations and vulnerability are deemed necessary and inevitable to and indeed demonstrably beneficial for the elites, at least in part because they create and reproduce elite status and control. …and all these we never measure. From this perspective, the counting and measuring of vulnerability is useful only if it is used to contribute to change the structures of power irresponsive to HR. (adapted from David Legge)
We more and more see a politically-motivated failure to count what matters.
9. Being uncounted is not generally a matter of coincidence, but reflects power: the lack of it, or its excess. Why do the SDGs call for ‘Leaving No One Behind’ when we are, in reality, counting ‘Those Who are Left Ahead’? The uncounted are those left at the bottom. (So, how will the SDGs really ‘Leave No One Behind’?) They go uncounted, because of an excess of power that keeps widening the haves/have-nots gap and that condones, among many other, tax abuses of individuals and companies, as well as the financial secrecy provided by privileged jurisdictions (including those of some of the richest that dodge taxes and the rule of law); add to this the hidden criminality of private and public sector corruption that systematically gets swept under the carpet. (Alex Cobham)
10. Fundamentally, it will be impossible to ensure no one is left behind without taking proactive and timely steps towards achieving targets like addressing discrimination, social exclusion and economic inequality. Inequalities between countries will also need to seriously be reduced, in particular by dismantling the structural, institutional and policy barriers which severely constrain the policy and fiscal space of the poorest countries, where the greatest number of those most at risk of being left behind. (Kate Donald) The corollary here is that we need to add to the SDGs the “Nothing About Us Without Us” principle.
Big data creates false confidence
11. We often think that politics is the enemy of good data, because we think politics corrupts data, but try generating data without taking politics into account, and it is just a disaster. The same is true for HR. This entrenched belief of unbiased data collection in development practice weakens foreign aid’s potential impacts. This is some of what we see at the global level: Because there is no global government, there is no accountability on the people that produce the global data, so it is always going to be of lower quality/questionable usefulness. (Angus Deaton)
Take home message
12. There is a limit we face in our understanding of important dimensions of HR issues. Take health care, for instance. We are at a time when health systems are increasingly involving a range of disciplines pretending to use more holistic models to respond to the mix of physical, socioeconomic and environmental factors that lead to preventable ill health and malnutrition. But they are excluding qualitative data vital to a HR perspective and this deprives decision makers of a significant body of knowledge that can indeed inform decision-making on health systems from a badly needed HR perspective. Basically the existing system effectively silences the voices of community members, particularly those who are marginalized –across all countries. Given the multiple factors (including dynamic individual and collective, as well as political and socioeconomic factors) that influence health and the way services are delivered and experienced, it indeed seems to oversimplify reality to give singular dominance to the old maxim that ‘it is what is measured that counts’. This is at the cost of the wider range of lenses that we have to explore and to analyze so as to really understand what counts –HR concerns certainly included. (EQUINET)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
schuftan@gmail.com
Postscript/Marginalia
-Communication is not just about what you say, it is about the reaction it causes in the listener.
As you use a smartphone, your smartphone gets smarter, but you get dumber**
-Why are we not digital dissenters? It would figure, since we are constantly distracted. We walk around with our eyes cast down upon our devices. We are rarely fully present anywhere. We concede our privacy. Robots are taking our jobs. Where do humans fit into this new economy? Really not as ‘creators of value’, but as ‘the content’, i.e., we are becoming the content itself. We are the data. We are the media. Techno-skeptics, who we would want to join, want to go back to the basics –to a world where the interests of humans [human rights (HR) included] come before the needs of robots, algorithms, and Silicon Valley. (Washington Post)
**: Our smartphones are merely new and powerful antidepressants of a non-pharmaceutical variety. There is no dark night of the soul anymore that is not lit with the flicker of the screen; but then, there is no morning of hopefulness either. (Andrew Sullivan)
-Despite the above valuable insight from the Washington Post, the media are increasingly reporting events in an elementary manner and, by and large, have abandoned the process of deep analysis, i.e., peering into the structural and human rights causes of human and humanitarian events. (Roberto Savio)