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.