uncounted – Page 2 – Alex Cobham

08/04/2015

Non-dom, undone?

An interesting development in the UK election campaign today, as the opposition Labour party will pledge to end ‘non-domicile’ tax status – an 18th century relic which allows residents to exempt their foreign income from tax, provided they can make at least some (often highly tenuous) connection to some other state.

It’s heartening to see tax in the centre of the discussion, not least given the minimal attention that has been paid to the UK pursuing the most extreme tax-averse austerity of any leading country (the only country to cut spending more than it cut the deficit).

Unsurprisingly, media attention has focused on the likely revenue impacts and the behavioural effects. Tax accountant Richard Murphy and tax lawyer Jolyon Maugham both suggest a top end revenue impact around £4 billion, falling with behaviour change to £1 billion or so. [Delete as appropriate: great minds/fools etc.]

The revenue numbers may be relatively small, but they’re not really the main point. Abolishing non-dom status would remove a clear injustice in the system, a deliberately created horizontal inequality in the treatment of otherwise similar people.

More importantly, it responds to Piketty’s case for a wealth tax:

The primary purpose of the capital tax is not to finance the social state but to regulate capitalism. The goal is first to stop the indefinite increase of inequality of wealth, and second to impose effective regulation on the financial and banking system in order to avoid crises.

Absent a tax, even at a nominal 0.01%, data may not be collected and so policymakers will lack information about the distribution which might lead them to set policies to tackle inequality. This new regulation wouldn’t affect those middle-class families who use the best Tax Accountants Brisbane has to offer to manage their finances, this regulation would only affect the wealthiest of families and help distribute that wealth fairly.

Aside from the aspect of tax injustice, non-dom status has been pernicious in part because it has taken a deal of high-income individuals’ income out of tax and other data – so that the actual distribution is simply not known.

If we can envisage scenarios in which policymakers may wish to address the (top end of the) distribution, then the absence of this data is an obstacle. In fact, this is one more example of the phenomenon of Uncounted – where the power of an elite group, in this case, allows them to go uncounted and this in turn militates towards higher inequality.

Finally, the existence of non-dom status is iconic – a clear message that the UK wishes to retain its role at the heart of global tax haven activity, providing differential tax and transparency treatment to a certain elite. Knocking non-dommery on the head would build the credibility of, for example, the outgoing government’s important efforts to address financial secrecy worldwide through the G8 and beyond.

02/04/2015

Immigrant life and death in Europe, uncounted

Just as immigrants to Europe are often undocumented, so too their deaths. The UK’s Institute of Race Relations has published a study looking at the known cases in recent years, and it makes for terrible reading from the title onwards: ‘Unwanted, unnoticed: An audit of 160 asylum and immigration-related deaths in Europe’.

Aside from the typically harrowing detail of each case, the study puts together an overview of the main patterns.

How can people be uncounted up to the point, even, of their death? Out of 160 cases, not even the cause of death is known for 32 people. Not. Even. For 43 people, even the basic information of nationality remains unknown.

Table 2 shows the main factors where these are known.

IRR uncounted migrant death 2015 tab2

These findings aren’t only important because, well, people died. As the authors put it:

If there is no publicly accessible record of deaths, how can states be held accountable?

Life as an immigrant can be tough. This is true even in the western world. For example, getting a Green Card to live and work in the US is a complex process. Quite often family ties are one of the most popular ways to secure a Green Card.

Under United States immigration law, foreign nationals can obtain a family-based Green Card if they are related to a US citizen or permanent resident. Correspondingly, form I-130 (Petition for Alien Relative) is a US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) form that is used to prove a valid family relationship exists between a foreign national intending to immigrate to the United States and a US citizen or permanent resident.

Ultimately, the eligibility and ineligibility requirements for form i-130 are complex. If you need help determining who is eligible and ineligible or any other assistance, it might be worthwhile contacting an immigration attorney.

The report calls to mind the CIPOLD review in the UK: the Confidential Inquiry into the premature deaths of people with learning disabilities. Through tracing individual stories of lives and deaths, the study created a set of baseline results that remain the best we have – including:

men with learning disabilities die, on average, 13 years younger than men in the general population; and
women with learning disabilities die, on average, 20 years younger than women in the general population. (Intersecting inequalities, anyone?)

These differences are not, to be clear, just a direct result of learning disabilities. They reflect society’s treatment of people who live with learning disabilities. The report finds, for example, that 37% of deaths would have been potentially avoidable if good quality healthcare had been provided (and see Chris Hatton’s powerful comment on discrimination by health specialists). This is awful. People shouldn’t be treated any differently due to learning disabilities. However, as evidence has shown that it may happen more often than we might think, it might be worthwhile for those with learning disabilities to consider taking the time to compare life insurance and find an affordable plan. This should allow people to leave their families with money to cover funeral costs if they pass away prematurely. People can click here to learn some other benefits of life insurance too.

There’s an earlier post here on how the problem of being uncounted with learning disabilities hasn’t been addressed in the UK since CIPOLD, and despite various high-profile scandals.

Not always, but often, an important part of not counting is not caring. And all the more so when the uncounted is a particular group. The phenomenon of Uncounted is not a technical one, but a profoundly political one.

Back to migrants in Europe. Uncounted, from beginning:

IRR uncounted migrant death 2015 tab1 To end:

IRR uncounted migrant death 2015 tab3

Link to the full study.

06/03/201518/04/2019

Transgender Reporting and Human Rights

I’m delighted to host this guest post from Fran Luke, full-time parent, un- and underemployed musician and teacher.

“Ignorance is the parent of fear.” Moby Dick, Herman Melville

I am not a subject matter expert. I do not pretend to be, nor have I ever had any intention of becoming one. I would much prefer to be playing with my children, writing music, improving and performing on my instruments, or even working at a job that allows me to adequately care for my family. That said, I have located and read as much reporting as I can find regarding Transgender Human Rights issues, globally.

After being advised by a member of an NGO advocating, I guess, for people ‘like me’ that the ‘time was not yet right’ to pursue Trans* rights at the UN level, I felt the need to learn more.

When our leadership spends more time speaking about the tie or dress they wore to a White House function, or how great it is our Trans* children can now die in endless war, it’s time to look elsewhere.

The argument for which group is the most marginalized should never be entered into. It is pointless. It’s always an issue of class and perceived degrees of humanity.

Transgender reporting

With regard to documentation, who is included or not, and policy, I’ll start with the UN. It’s my understanding population data is provided at the national level. This from a brief discussion with Anne-B Albrectsen at UNFPA, “We work to make sure that all countries disaggregate data as much as possible. Nationally owned data is best”.

Can data collected at the national level, perhaps the easiest way to get data into the system, accurately reflect conditions of marginalized sectors? Would it not often be the policies of those in power that keep marginalized communities where they are? The issues of the Rohingya and question of citizenship come first to mind.

There is not a great deal of reporting on the issues of Transgender human rights, but there is some. Rather than begin by referencing reports from LGBTI advocacy organizations, I thought it more appropriate to start with recommendations and reports from agencies within the UN.

UN-counted?

After being treated at times like an uncomfortable joke at some UN initiatives that invited civil society discourse, I thought I’d start with their own recommendations. These recommendations never seem to make it to the mainstream discussions of Human Rights, or the General Assembly for that matter.

Here is a list of recommendations from the 2013 UNDP Discussion Paper, ‘Transgender Health and Human Rights’:

Some of the recommendations from the 2012 UNDP report ‘Transgender Persons, Human Rights and HIV vulnerability in Asia and the Pacific’ include; having Trans* people as research partners, documenting and understanding Trans* vulnerability, promoting transgender rights and culture, making equality legislation work better.

The first of eleven recommendations relates directly to counting:

UNDP’s 2010 Issues Brief, ‘Hijras/Transgender Women in India: HIV, Human Rights and Social Exclusion’, includes the following recommendations:

Finally, these are the concluding thoughts from the UN-Women briefing paper, ‘The Transgender Question in India; Policy and Budgetary Priorities’:

Where next?

One question to consider is why this type of analysis has failed to penetrate more deeply into UN and national-level policy discussions.

Another is whether there are risks from being counted – whether invisibility does not sometimes provide a type of protection. The discussion, and struggle for the realization of Universal Human Rights for any segment of society can never be put off for political expedience. If the goal is truly a crosscutting, transformative human rights agenda, then we must start by recognizing our shared humanity. The cost of silence is, and has been far too great.

[From The Night is Another Country, RedLac Trans and the International HIV/AIDS Alliance.]

We know some information at least is there, provided as shown in these instances by the agencies or organizations that do not appear to bring it into the mainstream. So, who does the counting and decides what to count? I’ll end here with a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King:

Cowardice asks the question – is it safe?
Expediency asks the question – is it politic?
Vanity asks the question – is it popular?
But conscience asks the question – is it right?
And there comes a time when one must take a position
that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular;
but one must take it because it is right.

Selected Resources

Links

23/02/201525/04/2019

Uncounted: People with learning disabilities in the UK

It’s possible that there is no more excluded and marginalised group worldwide than people with learning disabilities. In fact, people with a physical or learning disability may often find that they aren’t able to get a job because of this factor. As a result, they are more likely to research into “how much is disability insurance” so they are able to make ends meet when it comes to supporting themselves. This can have a massive impact on their life, especially if they aren’t able to do what other people can do. There are certainly much more harshly and deliberately victimised groups in many places – but for a single group, neglected to the point of rights abuse on a global basis…?

It’s probably not useful to speculate about this anyway, and certainly not to set up any group against any other (and in no way is this speculation intended to downplay other global dimensions of exclusion such as gender and caste).

But here’s the point of thinking about it. If you wouldn’t immediately dismiss the suggestion as ludicrous, then it’s worth thinking about two things:

Why it might be that the underlying conditions to accept such a pattern of rights abuse might exist, systematically, across all sorts of societies with all sorts of histories and at all sorts of per capita income levels; and
Whether the exclusion of people with learning disabilities globally has anything like the level of public awareness, attention, or outrage, that it should.

Needless to say, if you buy the premise at all, then these two points have a common causality: the simple lack of importance given to the lives of people with learning disabilities.

Uncounting in the UK

This blog, if it’s about anything, is about the way that the marginalisation of some groups at least is exacerbated by being uncounted. Uncounted, so denied a full role in the statistics upon which policy decisions are made; and in the data which forms the base for political accountability.

Consider one of the world’s richest countries, and one with a long and proud history of universal (universal) health provision: the UK.

Here’s a little context from the last major study:

On average, men with a learning disability died 13 years earlier and women with a learning disability died 20 years earlier than the general population.
37% of deaths would have been potentially avoidable if good quality healthcare had been provided.

Periodically, the exposure of a particularly terrible case of abuse results in commitments to progress. The major recent example is the BBC’s exposure in 2011 of systematic abuse at the Winterbourne View hospital.

Aside from specific legal consequences, this triggered the ‘Concordat‘ – “a programme of action to transform services for people with learning disabilities or autism and mental health conditions or behaviours described as challenging”, signed up to by everyone from the Department of Health and Local Government Organisation, to the Care Quality Commission watchdog and major NGOs in the sector such as Mencap and the Challenging Behaviour Foundation. A particular aim was to move everyone who could live in the community – expected to be the vast majority – out of such institutions, with widespread closures expected.

A major component of the Concordat commitments was to better counting. Specifically, the Department of Health committed to:

Within getting into details, these commitments were both welcome in themselves, and indicative of the failure to count to that point.

Lack of progress report

More than two years since the Concordat – and getting on for four years since the motivating scandal broke – what progress has been made?

Earlier this month the National Audit Office published an important report on just this question, examining “the challenge faced in delivering key commitments in the Winterbourne View Concordat, the extent to which these have been achieved, and the barriers to transforming care services for people with learning disabilities.”

There has been a more or less complete failure to achieve the main objective of allowing people to move out of Winterbourne View-type settings and back into real lives, and/or not to enter such settings in the first place. To do what the Concordat aimed for:

a rapid reduction in hospital placements for this group of people by 1 June 2014. People should not live in hospital for long periods of time. Hospitals are not homes.

As the report notes, in 2012 data was a fundamental barrier to progress. Despite some important advances, the findings on the present position are damning.

NHS England lacks adequate and reliable data to monitor progress. In 70% of the 281 case files we reviewed at visits to 4 hospitals, there was at least one error in the June 2014 quarterly census data submitted to NHS England. Official data for our cohort of 281 patients showed an average stay of 3 years and 10 months. The actual length of stay was 4 years and 3 months in their current hospital.

Available statistics are not accurate either about the numbers of people in institutions, nor about even the most basic features of their experience.

This is a repeat, not a typo:

Available statistics are not accurate either about the numbers of people in institutions, nor about even the most basic features of their experience.

It’s difficult not to think that we (still) don’t bother counting, because we (still) don’t care enough to do it right.

A changing landscape?

I can see one reason to be cheerful. Sad to say, it doesn’t come from the big NGOs who are part of the Concordat. Their reaction to the NAO report didn’t seem to include taking any responsibility for its abject failure thus far, nor any suggestion of how their call for change this time would deliver any more progress than all the previous ones. (There’s a whole separate piece to be written about the ability to hold governments accountable of large NGOs with an existential dependence on public funding for service provision.)

No, if there’s a bright spot here, it comes from a quite different direction. The Justice for LB campaign, coming out of the completely unnecessary death of 18-year-old Connor Sparrowhawk in ‘care’, has developed into a grassroots movement of people living with disabilities and their families. [Full disclosure: Connor lived across the road and I love these guys.]

Justice for LB responded to the NAO audit of the Winterbourne Concordat with their own self-audit, which is (surprisingly!) a thing of beauty, anger and hope. The potential for the ‘LB Bill‘ to make it into parliament after the general election is real, and exciting.

Perhaps the best way to stop being uncounted is to demand it yourself – but of course if it were that easy, nobody who wanted to be included would be left out in the first place. Uncounted is a political phenomenon, and Justice for LB is a most welcome, and deeply political response.

23/01/2015

$17 trillion: ActionAid counting the gender (employment) gap

Here are four big bullets from ActionAid UK’s new report, ‘Close the gap!’:

Women earn 15% less than men on average. If women’s wage were raised to the level of men’s wages in all developing countries, with all else held equal, women would earn $2 trillion more.
Women’s participation is 37% lower than men’s. Raising women’s participation to equal that of men, all else held equal, would see women earn $6 trillion more.
Addressing both the wage gap and participation gap simultaneously in this way would see women earn $9 trillion more.
Extending the analysis to rich countries generates a global total gap of nearly $17 trillion.

Congratulations are due – it’s an enormously important issue and these are striking findings, so I hope it gets serious attention. [Disclosure: I commented on an early draft of the quantitative analysis.]

How good are the numbers? (Uncounting ahoy)

The methodology is fairly straightforward, and clearly set out in the report. If there’s a weakness, and there is, it’s in the data. ActionAid are commendably straightforward about this too:

Pay gaps and ratio of male to average wage taken from ILO data. There are many missing values. We fill the pay gaps using regional medians…

Inevitably given the extent of missing values, some of the extrapolations of pay gaps verge on the heroic. I’d judge the methodology to be reasonable in the data context, but make no mistake – the data context is shocking. Meanwhile,

Labour share data are taken from a [2012] working paper…

I’ve no reason at all to doubt the quality of these data, but how can it be that there is no better source than these multi-year averages calculated by a single IDPM researcher a couple of years ago? The report quite rightly highlights the gender implications of the failure to count unpaid work, and to this can be added the pretty desperate state of counting of paid work.

Normally I would insert some blather here about post-2015 and reasons to be cheerful, but ba’ hairs I’m having a bad day. Talk to me about the data revolution when you’ve decided who’ll be first up against the wall. It seems we’re really talking about incremental data reforms. Either way, serious improvements in gender disaggregation are urgently needed.

Some progress will certainly come via the Sustainable Development Goals, but let’s not kid ourselves. The Open Working Group SDG proposal includes:

8.5 by 2030 achieve full and productive employment and decent work for all women and men, including for young people and persons with disabilities, and equal pay for work of equal value

That should do it, right? Maybe. Remember the current failure of counting is the end-product of 15 years of the Millennium Development Goals – which included this more prominent target:

Target 1.B: Achieve full and productive employment and decent work for all, including women and young people

Still, I suppose the MDGs didn’t include a data revolution so this time is bound to be different. Right?

Three points of caution

Presentation. One issue to mention is the possibility that the number take a life of its own, as these numbers can, and ends up being presented as the cost of sex discrimination in employment. It’s not this – because there’s no reason to think that $17 trillion of extra employment will suddenly come into being if the world was fairer, so a good part of this would likely come instead from reduced male employment earnings. The $17 trillion reflects the estimated scale, in currency terms, of the sex gap in employment in developing countries.
Economics above the rest? While it makes sense in advocacy terms to go for a big number (that may be why you’re reading this post, for example), it’s unfortunate if it adds to the sense that only economic arguments matter. As the report makes clear elsewhere (in the bits that won’t make any headlines), the deeper dignity and empowerment dimensions are much more important and complex.
Inequality reinforced? A related point is that the nature of the calculation reinforces a different aspect of inequality. Consider two economies of the same size with the same gender participation gap but where the average wage in one is twice as big as in the other. The methodology will value the gap in the first as also being twice as big as the other. Now that seems unhelpful, on the face of it, if we would broadly think that the two economies and their respective gaps are of equal importance. In fact, we might think that the gap in the lower-income country is more important, since it is more likely to imply poverty for those on the wrong end.

To give a sense of how important this potential problem is within the overall calculation, compare the developing country and advanced country totals. In particular, note that the wage gap in rich countries is nearly twice that in developing countries. We certainly shouldn’t downplay the sale of the problem in rich countries, and I’m glad ActionAid have made the analysis global rather than giving the impression it’s only a developing world problem. But at the same time, measuring in dollar terms may overstate the relative importance of the problem in high-income settings; when the human costs in lower-income contexts may be equal or greater.

08/12/201408/12/2014

Welcome to Uncounted

Film trailer voiceover voice:

Imagine a world of such structural inequality that even the questions of who and what get counted are decided by power.

A world in which the ‘unpeople’ at the bottom go uncounted, and so too does the ‘unmoney’ of those at the very top. Where the unpeople are denied a political voice. Public services. Opportunities. And the unmoney escapes taxation, regulation and criminal investigation, allowing corruption and inequality to flourish out of sight.

This is the world we live in. This is Uncounted.

What links a samizdat publication in turn-of-the-century Khartoum, the liquidation of a Scottish football club, a Burmese mobilisation for the US census, the Swiss role in supporting apartheid, a campaign around UK learning disabilities and Thomas Piketty’s proposal for a global financial registry? The common thread is the relationship between power, inequality and being uncounted – a relationship that demands we pay much more attention to who and what are counted and not.

We may pride ourselves on being the generation of open data, of big data, of transparency and accountability, but the truth is less palatable. We are the generation of the uncounted – and we barely know it.

Counting is fundamentally political. Decisions about what and who to count not only reflect unequal power, they are also a major driver of inequalities. Our failure to acknowledge and challenge these automatic tendencies means that we unthinkingly facilitate them.

There are two major elements to the uncounted: that which is uncounted because of a lack of power, and that which is uncounted because of an excess of power. In addition, the category of that which is only counted in private has its own power dynamics. Policy implications vary according to the context and the type of uncounted – but there are some very clear channels if we decide – as we surely must – to address the problem head-on.

This site will include semi-regular blogging (that may eventually result in a book) on these issues and others, along with related publications and data as they appear. There’s also a particular space for the Palma: a measure of inequality, developed with Andy Sumner on the basis of Gabriel Palma‘s analysis of the income distribution.

[NB. This post will also live at ‘About Uncounted‘, for ease of location.]