Coming to Terms with Chance

Engaging Rational Discrimination and Cumulative Disadvantage

Oscar H. Gandy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754679615
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317164074
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The application of probability and statistics to an ever-widening number of life-decisions serves to reproduce, reinforce, and widen disparities in the quality of life that different groups of people can enjoy. As a critical technology assessment, the ways in which bad luck early in life increase the probability that hardship and loss will accumulate across the life course are illustrated. Analysis shows the ways in which individual decisions, informed by statistical models, shape the opportunities people face in both market and non-market environments. Ultimately, this book challenges the actuarial logic and instrumental rationalism that drives public policy and emphasizes the role that the mass media play in justifying its expanded use. Although its arguments and examples take as their primary emphasis the ways in which these decision systems affect the life chances of African-Americans, the findings are also applicable to a broad range of groups burdened by discrimination.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315572758-1

By the turn of the century, the analysis and management of risk had escaped the bounds of professional concern and scholarly expertise to claim a prominent place in the public consciousness. The Information Society had become the Risk Society, and the arcane wizardry of actuaries and statisticians became common, almost essential features of popular mass media fare. Estimates of probability based on analyses of events in the past have come to dominate decisions about the paths we should take in the future. Nothing worthy of our attention can avoid an assessment of chance.

There are undoubtedly a great many benefits that have been derived from the application of probability and statistics to an unimaginable variety of problems and concerns. In the view of some, they have “become the very guide of life,” and they have done so in extremely powerful ways. Indeed, in their almost routine application, they “have called new objects into being, coined new values, and established new standards of rationality and new claims to authority” (Gigerenzer et al. 1989: 270). Not all of these outcomes are the objects of praise, however. Indeed, this book is about the ways in which some uses of probability and statistics serve to reproduce and reinforce disparities in the quality of life that different sorts of people can hope to enjoy.

For some people, it seems that if it weren’t for bad luck, they wouldn’t have any luck at all. The impact of bad luck seems to cumulate rapidly over time, such that a bit of bad luck early in life increases the probability that losses will mount, and the gambler’s dream of breaking even, or getting ahead in the game eventually gives way to despair.

We are just beginning to understand how much initial positions play in the ways our lives develop. How well we do in the natural lottery that distributes genetic endowments at birth helps to determine how race, gender, and social class combine in unimaginably chaotic ways to move us down different paths along the unmapped roads of life. We are just beginning to appreciate the complexity in the mutually reinforcing and limiting systems that generates an array of opportunity structures or life chances that ultimately determine who, how, and what we are when we reach the end of our journey.

This book examines the ways in which public policy and private action further shapes the design of a variety of games that we may or may not see as fair. Policy decisions, informed by statistical analysis, shape the opportunities people face in the markets for education, employment and health. Strikingly similar analyses also determine what we can expect when we take our chances with the courts and the criminal justice system. Special attention is paid to the role played by an actuarial logic that informs routine decisions about access to financial resources, including insurance, that govern far more than access to credit.

The mass media play a critically important role in shaping the ways in which we understand the role of chance and luck in our lives, and in the lives of others. The ways in which the media frame the life chances that different groups confront helps to determine whether the public supports, opposes, or ignores proposals to modify public and private activity in these critical areas. This book provides an analysis of tendencies within the media that ironically serve to reinforce hardship and suffering in the lives of people that many investigative journalists had intended to lend a helping hand.

Challenging the actuarial logic that shapes the distribution of life chances in society is an exceptionally difficult challenge. This book represents the first draft of a declaration of independence from its imperialistic grasp, and a call to oppose its spread.

What's Luck Got To Do with It?

Unpredictability is a fundamental characteristic of what we commonly understand as luck. Luck is said to thrive “in the gap between probability and actuality, between what can reasonably be expected … and what actually occurs” (Rescher 1995: 35). We understand that when luck, or chance is really in charge, prediction is bound to fail. We might think, then, that any success in our efforts to predict the future should reduce the role of chance. At the same time, we also recognize that knowledge of the future really has to be distinguished from the actions we take to bring it into being.

Although when Karl Marx (1983) referred to men making their own history, but not making it as they pleased, he was commenting primarily on the constraints on our choices that have been established by choices made by others in the past. Our ability to make our futures is also constrained by the actions that others have not yet made, but will make in the future. And, while Karl Marx and Anthony Giddens both emphasize the fact that our futures are shaped by the actions of goal seeking individuals, Giddens (1984: 5) was more aware of the ways in which constraints on “knowledgeability” puts knowledge of the future beyond our reach.

We are not only limited in our ability to foresee the unanticipated consequences of our actions, but we are limited in our ability to make well informed choices because of the limits on our knowledge of the conditions under which we act. Just as we are not fully aware of the motivations that guide our own choices, we are largely ignorant of the motivated choices that others are, or will be making. Some of those choices are bound to change the circumstances shaping the opportunities and constraints that our own actions were meant to control.

This book is about the use of predictive technologies to shape the futures that people face in ways that no longer invite comments about misfortune or bad luck. Although we may not talk about the role of chance in many of the situations we observe, we are likely to raise questions about the role that justice and considerations of fairness have played with regard to the distribution of the outcomes that result from the choices that powerful actors have made.

Truly random, or chance distributions tend not be to assessed in terms of fairness. Games of chance are enjoyed in part because of the pleasures derived from a bit of unexpected good luck. Even when the impact of chance is tempered by skill, as in card games or even in the game of golf, the unexpected arrival of good fortune still tends to be enjoyed. However, when the deck is stacked, or marked, or the dice are craftily weighted, the fun quickly leaves the room. We feel as though we have been cheated of the benefits that were supposed to come on the winds of chance.

The same is true in the game of life. If the games in which we must compete are in some sense fixed, such that the outcomes tend to favor the house, or some other group of players, moral outrage becomes the order of the day. Perhaps, this is what we really mean when we say “life is unfair.” This is not simply an articulation of the view that we do not necessarily deserve everything that comes our way. It is also a suggestion that for some people, the odds may have been stacked against them, not merely by chance, but because strategic actors, informed by statisticians have changed the rules of the game.

It is also true that what people believe about the role of luck, fate, or chance also plays a central role in how they make their way through life. A fundamental distinction between people in terms of their beliefs regarding the “locus of control” over their lives (Rotter 1966) has been shown to be a powerful influence over the choices that they make, including how they respond to both opportunity and constraint. Although the underlying concept has been extended considerably, the primary distinction between those who believe that external factors determine their well being, and those who believe that they are the masters of their fate has been put to use in a broad range of behavioral analyses.

Even though relatively objective statistics may suggest that differences in exposure to hazardous risk are relatively slight, people in lower status positions tend to be more fearful of the myriad hazards in their environment. Some recent work suggests that the influence of status is modified to a great extent by differences in worldview, such that those with the perspectives most common among white males are also the least concerned about risks in their environment (Flynn et al. 2006). Those least concerned about risks also tend to believe that victims get what they deserve.

Consider the ways in which luck, chance, fate or fortune help to shape the quality of life that each of us may enjoy. Many believe that who we are, or who we become is both known and predetermined by the author of some grand design. However, because we don’t have reliable knowledge of that plan, most of us would grant that the kind of persons we will become is unpredictable, and to some degree, subject to the influence of luck or chance. Certainly our natural talents and abilities can be understood as the product of a “natural lottery.” And, although we may get to play an active role in shaping the kinds of people we will become, a great many of the challenges and opportunities we face along the way are also shaped to a considerable extent, by the hand of fate. Of course, it’s true that bad luck in the distribution of natural endowments can be overcome by good fortune in the environments that surround us. This fact helps to reinforce the impression that luck will always play some role in shaping our individual and collective futures.

One way of thinking about the possible futures that are shaped by luck as well as by the actions of others is in terms of “life chances.” Life chances are understood in terms of the options and the “ligatures” or constraints that are inherent in the structures of relations and associations that define our position within society (Dahrendorf 1979). That is, if we are to understand the ways in which the use of predictive models shape the futures of the seemingly unfortunate, we have to learn quite a bit more about the individual and institutional routines that generate cumulative disadvantages for these people one decision at a time.

And, while it is important to provide some clarity with regard to the consequences that flow from individual decisions to deny or to exclude, it is even more critical to understand the strategies, incentives, and rationales of those who make those decisions in the first place.

Coming to Terms with Chance

Ian Hacking (1990: 4) suggests that probability is “the philosophical success story of the first half of the twentieth century.” He makes this claim in part on the basis of yet another claim that few will challenge: that most public decisions these days are made on the basis of some analysis of data that will be discussed in terms of probability and chance.

Among the many contributions that Hacking makes to our thinking about the role that probability and statistics have come to play in our lives is his call for paying special attention to the ways in which the creation of categories, including categories of people, also works to shape the lives of those who thereby come to be measured. This fundamental insight has been extended with regard to the classification of people by race, class, and social position, as well as by the jobs they hold and diseases that alter the quality of their lives (Bowker and Star 1999).

Hacking and others have offered critical histories of the place of numbers in our lives. They remind us of the role that the history of ideas about what are the normal, or central tendencies within distributions of things, often invites even more consideration of departures or deviations from those norms. How we evaluate people, places and things in terms of their departures from what we have defined as the norm, is often a fundamental determinant of the positions they will come to occupy in still other distributions that we have yet to consider.

Although Hacking did take note of the ways in which concerns about deviations from the norm within population groups led to the development of a eugenics movement, he actually minimized the role that Karl Pearson and Frances Galton played within it (Hacking 1990: 120–21). Fortunately, another, more focused history of social statistics (Zuberi 2001), examines the links between a desire to “improve the human race” by selective breeding and more contemporary debates about the genetic basis of gaps in measured intelligence between whites and African Americans (Rushton and Jensen 2005).

Part of the contribution to statistical thinking that Pearson, Galton and others have made to our current concerns is reflected in the ways we have come to think about difference. Routinely we ask whether some measured or estimated difference is “real” or a merely a difference due to chance. This is the question that confronts researchers engaged in experiments as well as those seeking to capture the vagaries of public opinion. Unfortunately, our understanding of what these “statistically significant” differences really mean or imply is not as complete or as well distributed as many of us think it should be.

This failure to understand the meaning of difference is especially troublesome, as we have come to rely on an assumption of understanding on the part of those whose responsibility it is to develop and implement important public policies. A failure to understand the meaning of differences due to chance limits our ability to identify individual and institutional acts of racial discrimination that may have brought about these distinctions in the first place (National Research Council 2004).

Misapprehension of the true meaning of “except by chance” also includes a widespread failure to fully appreciate the importance of those things that we believe to be extremely unlikely. Nassim Taleb is a statistical thinker who occupies an important position on the margins of those who are primarily engaged with the normal and its occasional, but predictable departures. He argues for greater consideration of consequences likely to flow from the occurrence of the extreme statistical outliers that he refers to as “black swans” because they were assumed not to exist before they suddenly appeared (Taleb 2007).

We think of statistical black swans when we reflect on the impact of unanticipated events, like the attack on the twin towers of the World Trade Center in 2001. While such events can be accommodated within explanatory models after the fact, they are simply unimaginable, and therefore absent from the models that were in widespread use before they occurred. The impact of such events can be quite substantial, in part because of the ways in which responses to the event may themselves set other poorly considered processes into motion. These include the misguided and socially disruptive attempts to identify terrorists and then predict their attacks on U.S. targets (Schneier 2003).

The economic crisis that began to emerge in 2007 was also not expected, although recessions are a familiar cyclical feature of capitalist business cycles (Sherman 1987). The widespread suffering that ensued was not the product of a well coordinated terrorist plot, but was instead the result of an economic bubble that let the air out of the global economy. Neither crisis was predicted. And, in both cases, a government’s defenses were tested and found wanting, while its advisors barely knew where to begin.

Prediction versus Explanation

Although the statistical methods used to demonstrate the existence of racial and economic disparity, and perhaps, even to identify the relative contribution that different factors might play in the underlying process are similar to those used in the analytical models that guide public policy choices, the consequences that flow from these uses are quite different. Both analyses are likely to lead to decisions that change the distribution of life chances for some individuals. However, as I will argue throughout this book, the use of these tech...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Luck, Risk, and Life Chances
• 3 The Natural Lottery and our Genetic Endowments
• 4 Rational Discrimination
• 5 Markets that Matter
• 6 Financial Risk and Insurance
• 7 The Criminal Justice System
• 8 Public Policy Formation and Evaluation
• 9 The Media’s Role
• 10 “Quixotics Unite!” A Call to Arms
• Bibliography
• Index