Statistical dehumanisation

[trigger warning]

Dorset, Leeds, and now Nottinghamshire. Yet again, applying a century-old statistical population measure to individuals gives an utterly meaningless result.

I've already said what I want to say about the science behind this, so I'll just link to that and summarise below. I still have more to say about the attitudes, though.

[Director of Public Health Chris Kenny] said: "Obesity is on the rise in this country and what this weight management programme is designed to do is to raise the issue with parents.

"I wouldn't want this one particular case to undermine the whole programme."

Nor, I suppose, would he want the fact that the "science" he's using is not actually supported by the evidence to undermine his programme.

Or the fact that it's counter-productive and bullying of children who really should be considered too young¹ to be given My First Body Issues sets.

The problem isn't really the horribly flawed science. That's bad - and there's a serious group-think problem within the "obesity research" field that stops this getting much time.

The problem is the attitude to people that current "public health" schemes seem to regularly get sucked into.

"Public health" is not an easy job. Done well, it can save lives, improve health, and free up valuable funds that are no longer needed to deal with preventable diseases. However, it's something that only really works at a population level.

The infamous bacon cancer study found that the risk of a particular group of cancers increased from 5% to 6% through increased consumption of processed meats. Now, as was pointed out at the time, this means that for 99% of people, whether or not they eat bacon will make basically no difference to their risk of cancer. For many of those people, bacon is a tasty food, and giving it up or cutting back will make them unhappy.

From an individual perspective it's highly unlikely to be a good deal - permanently give up bacon now, to marginally decrease your chances of getting cancer thirty years later? Most of the people who would take that deal probably didn't like bacon that much in the first place, and so probably didn't eat enough for cutting it out to make a difference.

From a public health perspective the calcuation is completely different. If everyone stopped eating bacon, rates of this group of cancers would drop about 20%, saving millions of pounds a year, and saving thousands of lives. Who wouldn't want that?²

The conflict comes between the individual view and the population-statistics view of public health policy. It's very easy to forget that those statistics are made of individuals, all of which - even if they're identical on the measured statistics - have their own very different lives.

Population statistics is the "easy" way to do "public health". It's also - because it reduces people to a few broad numbers - inherently dehumanising. With that, it becomes easy to see why they won't be dissuaded from this course: they're saving [abstract] lives, so if a few [real] lives are harmed as a result, it's still worth it.

Because the underlying attitude is itself dehumanising, some bad science that reduces health to a couple of convenient numbers is very attractive. Rather than looking at individual health, fixing the numbers becomes the goal - and if your numbers are "wrong", that makes you a problem. For people who are already dehumanised regularly on an individual level, the effects combine very strongly

The "hard" way to do public health does also happen, and there are professionals working very hard towards it - providing green spaces, looking at food availability, considering safety issues, and so on - rather than blaming individuals for making the "wrong" choices. An approach that humanises rather than dehumanises is not only more compassionate, it's also more effective.

Not surprisingly, those public health professionals don't make the news for things like this.

Also not surprisingly, the government is quite happy to, for instance, cut funding to local councils and so force them to close leisure centres (something that is certainly bad for public health), but continues paying for schemes like this to shame people with non-approved bodies.

Footnote

¹ No, there isn't an appropriate age. The product failed safety tests.

² Given the current high unemployment, anyone whose job depends on people eating bacon, for a start.

Another fake cost saving measure which conveniently doesn't harm default people

Andy Godfrey mentions in comments that another area the Government intend to "save money" is by abandoning the implementation of the "dual discrimination" parts of the Equality Act 2010, having previously delayed their implementation.

Dual discrimination protection was introduced in the Equality Act to deal with the situation where, for instance, women are not discriminated against in general, and black people are not discriminated against in general, but black women are discriminated against. Under previous legislation, there was no legal recourse in this situation - dual discrimination would have introduced it.

It was one of the few areas in which the Equality Act unambiguously improved upon the previous legislation it replaced.

This was announced as part of the Budget speech by Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne MP (Conservative, Tatton)

£350 million worth of specific regulations will go – including the Equality Act’s costly dual discrimination rules;

Okay. How can the dual discrimination rules be "costly"? Certainly losing a dual discrimination case would be costly for the employer (or other organisation - service providers, schools, landlords, etc.), but that situation would imply that there was discrimination in the first place.

Similarly, having a law against murder costs the UK taxpayer millions of pounds a year on court costs, legal fees, police and forensics teams, prison buildings and staff, and so on. But we have that law despite the financial cost because we believe murder is wrong.

Similarly, dual discrimination is wrong, so we should be willing to pay for enforcement of laws against it. (As a civil rather than criminal offence, it wouldn't even be the taxpayer doing most of the paying)

A second possibility: dual discrimination would be uniquely vulnerable to malicious and vexatious claims. This isn't likely - the number of people who could claim dual discrimination at all in practice is lower than the number who could claim single discrimination (not by definition - the default side of any characteristic in the Equality Act can usually also make a claim - but nevertheless true in practice)

Furthermore, someone who wished to make a malicious claim could do so under existing single discrimination laws, or under laws not related to discrimination.

So, there's certainly not much case for abandoning this solely on the grounds that it would save money. If one believes that discrimination at all is wrong, then dual¹ discrimination is fairly obviously also wrong. The Conservatives are taking great pains to say that they definitely believe discrimination is wrong and try to shake off their deserved reputation as the party of the default. The Lib Dems, meanwhile, were if anything even more enthusiastic about the Equality Act than its Labour proposers, bringing several - mostly failed - amendments to try to extend its reach.

So: it's not that we "can't afford it", it's that the government doesn't want to.

But, actually, does dual discrimination legislation cost us anything in the first place? That all depends on who "us" are. We're "all in this together" apparently, so I'm going to define "us" as "anyone in the UK". This is the same measure that GDP uses, so there's no reason not to.

Okay. Let's take a typical employment discrimination case. Person A is paid less than person B, or refused a promotion, or not hired, not because of matters such as experience, performance, or aptitude, but because of their race, and/or disability, and/or some other protected characteristic.

Who loses out if this is corrected?

• The employer which discriminated is likely to have to pay compensation, and possibly make other adjustments at its own expense.

Who loses out if this is not corrected?

• The employer - again - which has failed to get the best person for the job, or to make best use of its employees, and so suffers reduced productivity.
• The employee, who gets less or no money as a result.
• Other employees or potential employees with a similar set of protected characteristics, who will likewise be discriminated against in future if the employer is not made to improve its procedures.

As with most government funding decisions, the first set is an obvious direct cost which can show up on a balance sheet. The second set are mainly intangible costs, which are virtually never considered in finance decisions, plus a very direct tangible cost to the discriminated-against person.

But all in all, it looks like the total financial cost is likely to be basically neutral. Actually, given the evidence from countries which have taken more steps than the UK against employment discrimination, the long-run financial cost of this decision is likely to be harmful to the economy, not helpful.

There are two beliefs that one could hold that would make this argument fall apart. I suspect Osborne and friends hold both:

1. Money in the profits of a corporation is significantly more valuable to the economy than money in the pockets of an employee.

   Given that one of the major causes of recessions and problems with ending recessions is a major collapse in domestic spending - which then goes on to impact corporate profits anyway because no-one buys their stuff - this is rarely true. Certainly not now.

2. Default people are inherently better at employment tasks than non-default people. The best person for a good job is always a straight white middle-aged non-disabled cis man. In a suit. With a briefcase. Therefore, almost all discrimination claims will be unfounded or vexatious - especially the dual discrimination claims - and so they should be banned. Worrying about the claims might lead companies to appoint underqualified women (which is tautologous) to avoid being sued.

   I can believe that a lot of the current government MPs believe this, but they were trying to pretend not to.

For some unspecified fraction of £350 million, of which most if not all would end up in the economy anyway, with possible productivity and economic bonuses in the long run, it seems rather cheap to correct some obvious social injustice.

Apparently not.

Footnote

¹ The fact that dual discrimination is not already illegal is a fairly distinct reflection of the compartmentalisation of equality considerations in mainstream UK politics.

The Equality Act went some way towards at least stopping these considerations being compartmentalised off from each other, though not towards removing much of the relentless default-focus in legislation not specifically concerning equality.

Recycling austerity

The local council has announced that from April it will be charging £24 to replace lost or damaged recycling bins or bags, except where they were damaged by the collection staff.

These things do get lost fairly often - ours have gone missing twice this year already - we put them out for collection in the morning; come back in the afternoon and they're gone - and no-one else on the street seems to have more than they should, either, so where they went is a mystery.

Which is most likely when someone's recycling bin goes missing?

1. Pay £24 for a replacement (expensive, especially if it keeps happening)
2. Drive waste to the local tip instead (inconvenient, and not an option for many)
3. Use disposable rubbish bags to put waste out instead (wasteful, and dangerous for recycling glass)
4. Throw everything in the non-recycling bin instead (easy, but defeats the point)
5. Steal someone else's bin (criminal)

Most people are honest enough not to go for option 5. But they probably won't pick option 1 either, given the choice. Still, I suppose the council saves money whichever option is chosen, and they need to do a lot of that right now, given the central funding cuts they've been given.

But it's yet another case where budget cuts are going to end up costing more in the long run as waste that could be recycled goes into landfill instead.

The cost of democracy

The No to AV campaign, apparently lacking good arguments in favour of First Past The Post, has claimed that AV would cost too much.

Plenty of other commentators have already pointed out that their claims are absurd - including the cost of the referendum itself as a cost of AV is the sort of accountancy that would get you investigated for fraud if you tried it on your corporate expenses; paying a huge amount for unnecessary vote counting machines₁ that we wouldn't actually buy; and so on.

The idea that a relatively trivial sum should be used as an excuse not to run a democratic process in one of the richest countries in the world has also been widely criticised, and rightly so. Next Left, for instance, points out that extrapolating the votes in a seat from a statistical sample would be even cheaper - Isaac Asimov's Franchise being the end of that road. (I didn't put cost saving as an explicit advantage of Vote From Hat, but perhaps I should have).

What's been missed, at least in the commentary I've read so far, is that while the principle that democracy is too expensive is repulsive to most Britons, we do it all the time - not in the choice of vote counting system, but in the operation of our vote collection.

At the last general election, there were several cases of disenfranchisement through underfunding - shortages of ballot papers that would have cost more to print; people being turned away from polling stations because local authorities didn't want to pay enough polling staff to meet the Electoral Commission recommended minimum staffing levels; intentionally using inaccessible polling stations; failing to spend time and money reviewing the accessibility of polling stations and fixing the problems, and so on. For some people with disabilities, the idea that it's not worth paying money to allow them to vote is well established.

I certainly believe that if you're going to have a democracy, you can't then put a maximum price on establishing a universal franchise - you pay the costs happily.

If First Past The Post is to be considered superior to Alternative Vote - a stance I disagree with, of course - it should be on the grounds of its ability to democratically reflect the will of the electorate, not on the grounds of cost. But let's apply that to other areas of electoral administration too, not just the vote counting system.

Footnote

1. The Meek variant of Single Transferable Vote, because it recursively adjusts the transfer values to get the optimal result (rather than the near-optimal estimates used by other STV variants), can only be counted by computer. Every other vote counting system I'm aware of, including most STV variants, can be done entirely by hand.

   A computer-assisted count - using generic laptops or desktops the local authority already has to run a spreadsheet or OpenSTV, not expensive specialised hardware - would make things considerably easier for most Single Transferable Vote variants, Borda, and Range Voting, but even that isn't necessary for Alternative Vote.

Buses, and the point of public services

The local County Council has had a major budget cut from central government. Part of dealing with this involves reducing or removing the subsidy they provide for certain services which would not be commercially viable.

While they say that this does not necessarily mean the service will be withdrawn, both of the major bus operators have said that they cannot afford to continue more than a few of the services without a subsidy.

Sunday services and evening services are facing the majority of the cuts, mainly in rural parts of the county.

There are two things related to this that I want to draw attention to, and they apply to all sorts of cuts that the government is making or requiring local councils to make.

Firstly, as reported in the local free paper:

About a fifth of all bus services in the county are not commercially viable. But the council believes more than 95% of bus passenger journeys would be largely or entirely unaffected by the cuts.

Obviously most passenger journeys are not going to be affected. Most journeys are made on busy routes, which don't need a subsidy. The point of public subsidy of bus routes - and indeed public funding of many things - is to make affordable services that would not be possible on a pure market model, but which are necessary to many people. To say that most journeys will be unaffected is true, but not relevant.

Lots of people who rely on the bus services to get about are going to find their movement restricted, and that leads on to the second point: cuts to public services have a knock-on effect on the private economy.

We're told by the government that public spending is preventing private spending. Well, in this case that's clearly not true - it's not as if there would be private operators on these routes without the public subsidy: the private operators have said so themselves.

But furthermore, this public subsidy helps private spending. Cut the evening services, and people won't be able to get into the urban centres of the county then - or won't be able to get out later without spending several times the cost of a bus ticket on taxi fares.

So people going into towns in the evening for the nightlife are a bit stuck, as are people who go into town to work in the pubs and clubs providing that nightlife, or in other evening shift jobs in shops where they clock off after 8pm when many services are being withdrawn or cut back. The local private economy takes a dip as a result.

They could get a car and travel that way, but that's a large cost to themselves so won't be practical for a lot of people who were relying on the buses before, and it also increases congestion and exacerbates the lack of parking in town centres, which makes things worse for everyone. And, of course, having got the car, they then don't need the bus to get around on weekday mornings and afternoons either, so that's fewer bus passengers, and perhaps some of the more borderline unsubsidised bus routes start to slip out of profit too.

Reduced private expenditure leads to reduced tax revenue, so the whole cycle starts again.

By supporting necessary but not commercially viable services, public funding helps both the public and private sector, both of which are likely to take severe damage in the next few years.