News from the Collective

A contribution by Dr Kayleigh Hodgkinson-Murphy and Dr Angela Daly.

The QUT Pathways to Ethical Data project combines the interdisciplinary expertise of Dr Angela Daly, Dr Kate Devitt and Dr Monique Mann, assisted by Dr Kayleigh Hodgkinson-Murphy, to investigate and promote ethical data practices & initiatives, towards a fair and just digital economy. The team members are co-editing an INC Theory on Demand book on ‘Good Data’ and currently have a call out for proposed chapters for the book, which will be published in late 2018.

Last month, on 22nd November, approximately 50 industry practitioners and academics gathered at Queensland University of Technology’s Gardens Point campus in Brisbane, Australia to participate in the ‘Pathways to Ethical Data’ workshop – known as ‘Good Data’ for short. Collecting participants from across Australia and overseas, as well as from a variety of industry, government and discipline backgrounds, the workshop sought to examine and discuss the complex issues surrounding ‘good’ and ‘ethical’ data practices.

Early in the workshop, Dr Kate Devitt from QUT facilitated an activity that asked everyone to order themselves from most to least dystopian in their view of data practices today and in the future. This activity served not only as an introduction between participants but as an introduction to the depth and breadth of opinions held on the practices of data collection, retention, research, and use. Many participants stood around the centre of the line, reflecting the general group opinion that data is neither inherently ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but rather that it’s the structures and practices surrounding the collection, retention or use of data that has an impact on whether the data can be considered ‘good’ or ‘bad’.

The themes that appeared during these early discussions were revisited in the longer talks given by various professionals in the field. Associate Professor Raymond Lovett (ANU), Dr Donna Cormack (University of Otago Wellington) and Dr Vanessa Lee (University of Sydney) spoke to the group on perspectives of Indigenous Data Sovereignty, identifying the specific complexities in both collecting and using data relating to Indigenous populations. Their discussions paralleled issues raised within the group discussions, namely that good data needs to engage with the community and further consideration needs to be given to data practices that reproduce colonial structures. Following this, a collection of lightening talks paired industry professionals with academics to speak in detail on particular topics such as community wifi initiatives, electronic health records, the ethics of open data and the recent ‘robodebt’ controversy in Australia where the government has badly implemented algorithmic decision-making to identify overpayments of welfare. These talks gave an opportunity to blend industry expertise with a broader academic framework and led to passionate and spirited discussion throughout the room.

The workshop proved to be an informative and valuable introduction to the project – identifying just how complex the issues surrounding data can be. However, while participants were honest about the very real issues and problems currently enmeshed in various industry and government data practices, there was also considerable discussion about the routes available to move towards more ethical data futures.

Following the daytime workshop, the QUT Good Data project team partnered with Thoughtworks’ Brisbane office for a public evening event. After a technical demonstration of bias and discrimination in machine learning, QUT’s Dr Monique Mann facilitated a discussion with special guest Asher Wolf, a well-known information journalist, digital activist and founder of the world-wide CryptoParty movement. Asher spoke about her own journey as an activist and fighter for good information and good data to great applause from a packed audience. A good end to a good day of good data!

Do you want to participate, consider sending in a proposal to the Call.

In the last few years there has been a proliferation of new “little development devices” and practices in places where we might least expect them: at the World Bank and in national development agencies usually associated with the kinds of large-scale infrastructure mega-projects that these institutions pioneered after World War II. Yet the current emphasis on “little” development devices cannot be understood as a straightforward reaction to earlier forms of development policy that used “big” development devices. Rather, if we want to understand the current fascination with little development devices, we need to look at a different moment in international development institutions’ history: the many prominent failures in development assistance that marked the 1990s, such as the AIDS epidemic, the Asian financial crisis, and the “lost decade” of development in sub-Saharan Africa.

If we cannot understand the emergence of these new devices without paying attention to the recent failures of development policy, does that mean that they signal the failure of international development as we’ve known it? Yes and no: yes because many of them have been developed as innovative responses to the failures of development assistance, and no because they are nonetheless still very much development devices aimed at many of the same objectives that have held sway since the mid-twentieth century, including economic growth and poverty reduction.

In fact, although policy failures are central to this story, the part they play is a surprisingly creative one. These failures were profound enough to provoke a crisis of development expertise, leading development practitioners to question their very metrics of success and failure. Over time, these practitioners sought to re-establish the grounds for their authority, reconceiving the object of development—poverty—by forging new metrics of aid success, by developing new techniques for its measurement, and by adopting new devices amenable to this kind of measurement.

Rather than the failure of development, what precipitated the proliferation of these new micro-devices was thus the transformation of development governance through its engagement and problematization of failure, as well as its growing preoccupation with the ever-present possibility of future failures.

Responding to Past Failures

Beginning in the 1990s, there was a lot of talk about the failure of development policies. Some external critics focused on the persistence of extreme poverty in sub-Saharan Africa, while others pointed to the AIDS crisis in Africa, or the sudden increase in poverty in Asia after the 1997–1998 financial crisis. All of these crises had occurred on the watch of the major development organizations in spite of (or, as many critics suggested, because of) their efforts.

Inspired by these crises, both external critics and many of those working in the policy development and evaluation units at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) began to point to various policy failures (Collier 1997; Killick 1997). Staff in the Policy Development and Review department at the IMF, for example, noted that the ever-increasing number of conditions that aid packages imposed on poor countries had no positive effect on compliance, and were significantly reducing borrower governments’ “ownership” of the reforms (Boughton 2003). Meanwhile, the World Bank’s Operation Evaluation Department’s (OED) assessments were pointing to dramatically declining success rates—from 80% to 85% in the 1980s to less than 65% in the 1990s (OED 1994), figures that were of great concern to World Bank president James Wolfensohn.

One of the underlying targets of these criticisms was the policy framework known as the “Washington Consensus,” a broadly neoliberal approach to development that put growth at its core and saw the market as the best way of achieving development goals (e.g., Stiglitz 1998:1). Yet, even as the World Bank dedicated its 1997 flagship World Development Report to the “rediscovery” of the state after two decades of denigrating or denying its role, the report was also very careful to distinguish the World Bank’s present strategy from earlier state-led approaches to development, arguing for the need to “take the burden off the state by involving citizens and communities in the delivery of core collective goods” (World Bank 1997:3).  Treating both state- and market-dominated approaches as failures, the World Bank has pursued a middle way between the two, forging new and dynamic assemblages of public and private actors, claims, and practices to simultaneously pursue public goals and private interests (Best 2014a).

Contested Failures

Of course, policy failures occur all the time. Sometimes they are perceived as failures, and sometimes they are ignored. Yet occasionally they become what I call “contested failures”: failures important enough to produce widespread debates about the meaning of success and failure and the metrics through which we evaluate them (Best 2014b). The concept of contested failure is connected to what Andrew Barry calls “knowledge controversies,” in which the metrics that are usually taken for granted become, for a time, politicized (Barry 2012).

These are interesting moments when we confront them in our everyday lives. Many of those of us who teach for a living, for example, have confronted a set of exams that fall so far below our expectations that they force us to re-evaluate our conceptions of success and failure (and, at least in my case, to change the assignment altogether). Such contested failures are fascinating moments in politics because the question of what counts as success is both highly technical—involving questions of evaluation and calculation—and normative—raising the question of what we value enough to define as success.

The “aid effectiveness” debate that emerged in the 1990s and early 2000s was a classic example of this kind of contested failure, as its participants responded by problematizing and ultimately rethinking what makes aid succeed or fail. This widespread debate, which included practitioners, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), academics, and politicians, raised important questions about why aid did not seem to be working, and ultimately produced some rather different definitions of what counts as successful development (World Bank 1998).

New Definitions of Success

The new definitions of success that began to take hold from the late 1990s onward were somewhat paradoxical.

On the one hand, the conception of success that began to emerge was far bigger and messier than it had been in the past. In the place of narrowly economic definitions of effectiveness, agencies now sought to pursue a much broader and longer-term set of objectives, recognizing that economic development is inextricably linked to political, social, and cultural dynamics that are often particular to a given country or region. For example, development staff hoped to achieve a much greater level of “country ownership” over the policies that they believed needed to be pursued, seeking to encourage domestic engagement by various stakeholders. Their goal was to build political support for ambitious, longer-term institutional reforms, whether through (at least somewhat) participatory consultations or community-driven development.

On the other hand, the metrics for measuring success became increasingly narrow, particularly as the enthusiasm for results and outcomes-based evaluation began to grow in the 2000s. These new metrics sought to respond to (and reduce) the ambiguities produced by the expanded conception of development objectives by making them more readily quantifiable. If development policymakers and aid ministers were no longer able to point to a school or dam to show where the dollars had gone, at least (the theory went) they could point to a measureable result that affirmed a direct line of causality between policy, output, and longer-term outcome.

Not surprisingly, one of the effects of this drive to make aid outcomes measurable has been to create incentives for pursuing policies that are easier to measure. For example, the “cash on delivery” approach, developed in 2006 by the U.S.-based think tank Center for Global Development, promises to pay a set amount for each “unit” of an agreed result. One pilot project developed by the British Department for International Development (DFID) in Ethiopia pays the government £50 for each student who sits a particular exam, and £100 for each one who passes it. This kind of fixation on measurable results creates a proliferation of policies aimed at getting students in exam seats and bed-nets on beds while driving policymakers away from the kind of complex, messy conceptions of development success that the aid effectiveness debate had revealed to be so important.

New Micro-Devices: Poverty, Cash Transfers, and Microcredit

Many of the devices and practices that emerged in the years since the aid effectiveness debate reflect this hybrid character. Although the large-scale, macro-level ambitions of market-led development and poverty reduction remain at the heart of these policies, they are now increasingly pursued through more cautious, smaller-scale, micro-level techniques. This does not just mean that these interventions address the same targets at a smaller scale. Rather, the embrace of these new techniques of intervention corresponds to a new ontology of the object of development.

One area in which we can clearly see this combination of macro-ambitions and micro-techniques is in efforts to reduce poverty. Part of what development researchers and practitioners found so unsettling about the Asian financial crisis and AIDS crisis was how these events pushed huge numbers of people back into poverty, undoing decades of progress. Led by the Social Protection Unit at the World Bank shortly after its creation in 1996, a number of aid agencies began to move away from static conceptions of poverty that generally assumed once an individual or family moved out of poverty they would stay that way (World Bank 2001a). These policy failures forced aid practitioners to rethink poverty on an ontological level, seeing it as a dynamic process rather than a static state (Best 2013). Staff working on social protection at the World Bank sought to redefine poverty as social risk and vulnerability, and to devise a range of more flexible devices in response. This approach to poverty reduction ultimately became a core part of the influential 2000–2001 World Development Report Attacking Poverty, and has been adopted by a number of other organizations, including the DFID and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD; World Bank 2001b).

The logic of the social risk approach is straightforward: in a volatile and unpredictable world where political, economic, climate, and health crises are always possible, poverty-reduction policy needs to help individuals and communities become better risk managers, capable of preparing for and responding to external shocks. Because some risks are covariant (affecting a large community or even the entire national population), traditional forms of insurance may not be effective because they were designed to respond to idiosyncratic risks (such as a single individual’s health difficulties, or a house fire). The state therefore becomes an important part of the solution, but only as one actor among many, resolving problems of market failure, supporting and combining with private sector initiatives, and enabling individuals to become more active in managing their own risks.

Some of the most popular devices for managing poor people’s vulnerability to poverty, including conditional cash transfers (CCTs) and microcredit initiatives, clearly reflect this hybrid public-private, micro-level focus. CCTs are state-provided funds targeted toward very poor populations, particularly women, generally on the condition that they keep their children in school and bring them in for regular health check-ups. The funds are supposed to help poor people respond to immediate shocks, whereas the conditions are aimed at increasing the resilience of future generations and improving their chances of becoming better risk managers.

Microcredit initiatives, which provide very small loans to people who would not qualify for conventional credit, started out as state and NGO-funded programs but have become increasingly market (and profit) driven in recent years. Their objective is to provide poor individuals with the kind of financial credit that they need to actively take “good” economic risks (such as investing in education or an entrepreneurial activity), in the belief that this will allow them to become more active and autonomous participants in the market economy.

As the World Bank’s first Social Protection Strategy’s title made clear, although this approach works at the micro level, it continues to have macro-level development ambitions, even as it reconceives them in more dynamic terms: seeking to transform social protection efforts from “safety-net to springboard” (World Bank 2001a). The Social Protection Unit’s current website builds on this idea:

In a world filled with risk and potential, social protection systems help individuals and families especially the poor and vulnerable cope with crises and shocks, find jobs, improve productivity, invest in the health and education of their children, and protect the aging population (World Bank 2017).

Evaluation

For the many experts and officials at international development agencies seeking to re-establish their authority in the wake of the failures of the 1990s, these new development devices are attractive in part because their promise of calculability. Many CCT programs have been explicitly designed to collect evidence about their effectiveness, and their growing popularity among development agencies is linked to the promise of demonstrating measurable results. After inconclusive evidence about whether it was the cash or the conditions in CCTs that had some positive effects on school enrollment, a growing number of CCT programs have been designed as randomized experiments that test the effectiveness of conditional and unconditional payments (Baird et al. 2010).

In the case of microcredit, calculability plays a very different but nonetheless crucial role: the development of increasingly sophisticated techniques for evaluating and pricing credit risk among the very poor has made it possible for large financial firms to become involved, not only expanding microcredit but also building a new financial industry around the packaging and resale of these loans to foreign investors (Langevin 2017). These firms have managed in some cases to securitize large portfolios of microloans (rather like the subprime mortgages at the heart of the last global financial crisis), translating the often very high interest rates charged to poor borrowers into global flows of investor value (Aitken 2013).

Governing Failure

Although these various new development devices hold the promise of measurable results, we should not overestimate their technical proficiency; they continue to face the problem of failure even as they seek to respond to it. In fact, many of these new development initiatives have failed to meet at least some of their main objectives. The evidence on conditional cash transfers, though plentiful, is mixed: they do seem to have positive short-term effects on educational enrollment in particular, but their longer-term effects are difficult to demonstrate, and it is not clear yet whether the conditions themselves make any difference. There have also been some highly publicized failures in microcredit, including a rash of suicides by individuals crushed by microfinance debts in Andhra Pradesh, India, that have reinforced a broader questioning of its capacity to alleviate poverty.

More fundamentally, the tension that I identify at the outset of this article—between a growing recognition of the messiness of development success and a persistent desire to tame and often deny that complexity by simplifying forms of measurement and evaluation—remains itself a nagging source of failure. Many of the development practitioners I have spoken to are well aware that it is nearly impossible to make tidy causal links between a given policy action and a complex series of longer-term outcomes, particularly where there are multiple other aid actors and external dynamics in play. Yet, because they are forced to play the game of measurable results, they have begun to design their policies so that they are as easy to measure as possible, distorting development objectives to make them appear calculable (Natsios 2010).

This emergent micro approach to development assistance remains a paradoxical one: cultivating public goals by mobilizing private interests, pursuing more complex objectives while trying to translate them into simpler metrics, and ultimately courting repeated failure to give the veneer of success.

References

Aitken, R. 2013. “The Financialization of Micro-Credit.” Development and Change 44(3):473–499.

Baird, S., C. McIntosh, and B. Ösler. 2010. “Cash or Condition? Evidence from a Randomized Cash Transfer Program.” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 5259.

Barry, A. 2012. “Political Situations: Knowledge Controversies in Transnational Governance.” Critical Policy Studies 6(3):324–336.

Best, J. 2013. “Redefining Poverty as Risk and Vulnerability: Shifting Strategies of Liberal Economic Governance.” Third World Quarterly 34(2):109–129.

———. 2014a. “The ‘Demand’ Side of Good Governance: The Return of the Public in World Bank Policy.” In The Return of the Public in Global Governance, edited by J. Best and A. Gheciu, pp. 97–119. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

———. 2014b. Governing Failure: Provisional Expertise and the Transformation of Global Development Finance. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Boughton, J. M. 2003. “Who’s in Charge? Ownership and Conditionality in IMF-Supported Programs.” IMF Working Paper WP/03/191.

Collier, P. 1997. “The Failure of Conditionality.” Perspectives on Aid and Development, edited by C. Gwyn and J. Nelson, pp. 51–77. Washington, DC: Overseas Development Council.

Killick, T. 1997. “Principals, Agents and the Failings of Conditionality.” Journal of International Development 9(4):483–494.

Langevin, M. 2017. “L’agencement entre la haute finance et l’univers du développement: des conséquences multiples pour la formation des marchés (micro)financiers.” Canadian Journal of Development .

Natsios, A. 2010. The Clash of the Counter-Bureaucracy and Development. Washington, DC: Center for Global Development.

Operation Evaluation Department, World Bank (OED). 1994. Annual Review of Evaluation Results 1993. Washington, DC: Operation Evaluation Department, World Bank.

Stiglitz, J. 1998. Towards a New Paradigm for Development: Strategies, Policies, and Processes. Prebisch Lecture. Geneva, Switzerland: United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.

World Bank. 1997. World Development Report 1997: The State in a Changing World. Washington, DC,: World Bank.

———. 1998. Assessing Aid: What Works, What Doesn’t, and Why. New York: Oxford University Press.

———. 2001a. Social Protection Sector Strategy: From Safety Net to Springboard. Washington, DC: World Bank.

———. 2001b. World Development Report 2000/01: Attacking Poverty. Washington, DC: World Bank.

———. 2017. “Social Protection: Overview.” Available at  link.

Image Credit: Consumer pays for her purchase with 1000 rupiah at a market in Lenek Village, East Lombok District, Indonesia. Asian Development Bank.

In the last 20 years, global health experts have recognized the importance and encouraged the adoption of sin taxes in the fight against non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in the Global South. At the level of discourse, this is illustrated by the vast global health literature on NCDs published from the late 1990s onwards: reports and action plans issued by international organizations like the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Bank, editorials and scientific papers in medical journals like The Lancet, and policy documents and pamphlets prepared by aid agencies, health charities, and private philanthropies. Most of these documents start by reminding readers that NCDs—chronic diseases such as cancer and diabetes associated with behavioral risk factors like smoking, drinking, and unhealthy diets—are now responsible for most of the burden of death and disability across the Global South. They then identify excise taxes levied on tobacco, alcohol, and sugar as the most effective strategy to address this burden of death and disability.

WHO poster for the 2014 World No Tobacco Day advocating for taxes on tobacco products as a strategy to lower the associated burden of death and disease.

This literature explains how—given that price is correlated with demand for tobacco, alcohol, and sugar—increasing taxes on these products will markedly reduce rates of smoking, drinking, and unhealthy eating and thereby the incidence of chronic diseases associated with these behaviors. It also stresses how sin taxes not only improve the health of nations, but also strengthen their finances. Indeed, as many of the experts cited in this literature make clear, increased taxation rates largely compensate for the decrease in tobacco, alcohol, and sugar consumption, thus allowing national governments to amass larger tax revenues that can be earmarked to finance national health systems and achieve universal health coverage. Last but not least, this literature also extols the fact that, as indirect taxes, sin taxes are relatively easy to set up and administer for governments. At the level of practice, the growing importance of sin taxes within global health can be illustrated by the mounting number of countries in the Global South—from Chile, Mexico, and South Africa to Thailand, India, and the Philippines—that have introduced taxation schemes for tobacco, alcohol, and/or sugar to combat the NCD epidemic. Many of these national schemas have been supported by international efforts such as the Bloomberg Initiative, a US$1 billion project to reduce tobacco use in developing countries led by the Bloomberg and Gates foundations, in which sin taxes play a central role.

In many ways, sin taxes are typical of the micro-technologies that have proliferated in the fields of development and humanitarian aid in the past two decades, what Stephen Collier, Peter Redfield, and their colleagues have called “little development devices” and “humanitarian goods” (Collier et al., 2017; Cross, 2013; Redfield, 2012). Indeed, like many of these micro-devices, sin taxes are meant to improve people’s quality of life, are eminently portable, and, as I discuss below, operate at the micro level, targeting individuals’ aspirations, preferences, and calculations rather than any larger macroeconomic aggregate. In this essay I shed some light on the complex genealogies of these micro-technologies by unpacking some of the political theories, scientific concepts, and ethical norms that make up sin taxes. I suggest that sin taxes are built around a particular subject—the rational actor seeking to maximize their welfare in line with their own preferences—whose origins can be traced back to the Chicago School’s microeconomic tradition and its concern with rational choice theory. In doing so, I draw on Madeleine Akrich’s (1992) concept of “de-scription” and her claim that one can find inscribed in a technical device many of the assumptions, aspirations, and values of those who designed it. In my de-scription of sin taxes I examine the work of a small network of economists led by University of Chicago professor Gary Becker and two of his collaborators, Mike Grossman and Frank Chaloupka, that was instrumental in transforming sin taxes into an accepted global health strategy. In particular, I focus on this network’s research on tobacco taxation, which was the first type of sin tax to gain acceptance in the global health field and later served as a model for excises on alcohol and sugar. I begin by showing how this research grew out of Chicago’s microeconomic tradition and Becker’s work in particular before examining how it radically transformed international tobacco control and the model of the smoker that underpins it. I conclude by reflecting on what this story can teach us about the wider history of the recent proliferation of micro-technologies in the fields of development and humanitarian aid.

Tax revenue stamp from South Africa. From Andrey Vasiunin’s online collection.

The Chicago microeconomic tradition was articulated by George Stigler, Gary Becker, and other members of the Chicago School from the 1950s onwards. As historian Steven Medema (2011:153) has carefully documented, for the earlier generations of Chicago economists, from Frank Knight to Milton Friedman, economics was the study of the “social organization of economic activity” and, in particular, “markets as coordinating devices.” This changed after the 1960s following the arrivals of Stigler and especially Becker at the University of Chicago. For this new generation, economics was redefined as the study of “human behavior” and, specifically, “rational individual choices” under “conditions of scarcity” (Medema 2011:161–162). By redefining their object of study in this way, the new generation of economists at Chicago profoundly altered their discipline (Foucault 2008). First, they made it possible to analyze how individual decisions had implications at the macro level, thus extending economic analysis within its own domain. Second, they encouraged economists to espouse an expansionist agenda and apply their methods to traditionally non-economic domains. As Medema (2011:172) has also showed, the reason for the shift of focus from social organization and markets to individual behavior and choice lies in the marked influence that rational choice theory had on many of the new generation of Chicago economists. Indeed, this “new science of choice,” articulated during the Cold War around the notion of the “rational actor,” was a “catalyst for change” in the American social sciences, where it introduced a fresh focus on and new techniques to analyze the role of individuals and their decisions in the making of complex social phenomena (Amadae 2003:5–8).

Gary Becker’s work has been central to Chicago’s microeconomic tradition (Medema 2011). Becker established the idea that economics was about the study of human behavior and choice. A disciplinary imperialist, he also believed that economics should not be limited to behaviors usually studied by economists but expanded to behaviors traditionally analyzed by other social scientists such as sociologists and anthropologists. As Becker explained, economics was about “problems of choice,” whether that was “the choice of a car, a marriage mate [or] a religion” (cited in Medema 2001:161). These beliefs strongly influenced the sort of questions (Why do individuals decide to invest in education? Why do they elect to marry and have children? Why do they choose to engage in criminal activity?) that he sought to address in his own research. The way in which Becker approached and analyzed human behavior was informed by rational choice theory. Specifically, he suggested that choices made by individuals should always be considered rational, even when they are criminal or antisocial. By rational, Becker (1992:38) meant that these choices are made by individuals who seek to “maximize welfare as they conceive it.” He believed that when doing so, individuals take into account their own “values and preferences” and anticipate as best they can “the uncertain consequences of their actions” (Becker 1992:38). He also supposed that their choices are “constrained by income, time, imperfect memory, calculating capacities and other limited resources” and shaped by “the available opportunities in the economy and elsewhere” (Becker 1992:38). For Becker, the task of the economist was to develop and empirically test mathematical models that identified and organized these different variables in a way that explained and predicted the type of behavior being analyzed.

Not until the 1980–1990s did economists systematically apply the tools and concepts of Chicago microeconomics to the study of smoking (Reubi 2013, 2016). Two interrelated bodies of work were critical in that respect. The first encompassed the studies on the demand for tobacco products carried out by Mike Grossman together with his former student Frank Chaloupka and others (e.g., Chaloupka and Grossman 1996; Lewit et al. 1981). Grossman was key in popularizing the use of Chicago microeconomics to analyze health-related behaviors, both in his own research and as director of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s (NBER) Health Economics Program. For his PhD carried out under Becker’s supervision, Grossman constructed a model of the “demand for good health” where health was a form of “human capital” that everyone possessed and could choose to invest in and increase (Grossman 1972:xiv–vx). Given his interest in health at a time when smoking had become a major public health issue in North America and Europe, it is unsurprising that Grossman subsequently chose to work on the demand for cigarettes together with Chaloupka and other colleagues. This research first established that price was a key factor for the demand for cigarettes. The research also showed that price was a particularly powerful motivator for young adults and individuals of low socioeconomic status, who have less income and are more resistant to public information campaigns on the dangers of smoking. The second body of work encompassed the studies on addiction conducted by Becker in collaboration with Grossman, Chaloupka, and a few others (e.g., Becker and Murphy 1988; Chaloupka 1990). Building on insights from rational choice theory, Becker and his collaborators claimed that contrary to popular belief, “addictions are rational in the sense of involving forward-looking maximization with stable preferences” (Becker and Murphy 1988:675). Using cigarettes and alcohol as their case study, they also built and tested a behavioral model that predicted the demand for addictive substances was greater among individuals who had “low incomes,” were “more present-oriented” and/or had experienced “unhappy” and “stressful events” (Becker and Murphy, 1988:694; Chaloupka 1990:737).

Up to this point, two very different intellectual traditions dominated the field of international tobacco control. The first, which stemmed from the field of health education, was built on the notion of knowledge or information (Berridge 2007, chapter 2; Reubi and Berridge 2016). Public health experts working within this tradition assumed that people smoked because they did not know that tobacco was harmful to their health. Following that assumption, experts believed that their main task was to ensure people were informed about the dangers of smoking. This meant educating people about these dangers through warning labels on cigarette packages, school education programs, and, most important, public information campaigns, which were deemed to be the most powerful anti-smoking measure at the time. This also meant shielding people from the tobacco industry’s marketing and public relations efforts through advertising bans and advocacy tactics to monitor and counter the industry. The second tradition, which grew out of developments in psychology and psychopharmacology, was centered on the notion of addiction (Berridge 2007, chapter 9; Brandt 2004). For public health experts and psychologists who came from this tradition, the reason people smoked, or continued to smoke, was their addiction to nicotine, the psychoactive substance in tobacco. Specifically, they contended that nicotine could, by acting on the brain via complex biomolecular pathways, control the behavior of smokers and compel them to continue smoking. For these experts, the main task was to treat this addiction, which they viewed as a pathology, by using smoking cessation techniques such as behavioral and nicotine replacement therapies.

Cover of the International Union against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease’s Factsheet on Tobacco Taxation, with the caption “Young people are most likely to quit when prices rise.”

The work on smoking carried out by Becker and his colleagues posed a direct challenge to these two intellectual traditions, leading to a rupture in and a partial reconfiguration of the field of international tobacco control in the late 1990s. To start, the work of Becker and his colleagues radically altered the view public health experts held on taxation (Reubi 2013). Until then, these experts largely ignored sin taxes as an anti-smoking measure for many reasons, ranging from ignorance about how taxation worked to discomfort about sin taxes’ regressive nature. The network of economists led by Becker helped change this perception, progressively bringing public health experts to see taxation (rather than public information campaigns) as the most potent strategy in the fight against tobacco. Grossman’s work in particular, which showed that price (rather than knowledge) was key in curbing tobacco use in groups where prevalence rates had remained stubbornly high (like the young and the poor), was critical in that respect. Furthermore, the work of Becker and his colleagues also helped establish a new model of the smoker in public health thought. Inscribed in the taxation schemes now multiplying across the tobacco control field, this model was centered on the idea of individual choice rather than the notions of knowledge and addiction associated with health education and psychology, respectively. In this new model, people smoked because they made a rational choice to do so in the sense of a welfare-maximizing calculus based on their preferences and existing circumstances. Although knowledge and addiction retained a place within this model, they were only two factors among many others such as price, education, and pleasure that could influence an individual’s decision to smoke. Moreover, it was up to that individual to determine the importance of these two factors when they weighed their options. As Chaloupka and other leading public health experts and economists argued in an influential World Bank (1999:3) report on tobacco control:

Consumers are usually the best judges of how to spend their money…. [They make] rational and informed choices after weighing the costs and benefits of [their actions]…. Smokers clearly perceive benefits from smoking, such as pleasure and the avoidance of withdrawal, and weigh these against the private costs of their choice. Defined this way, the perceived benefits outweigh the perceived costs, otherwise smokers would not pay to smoke.

To recapitulate, I showed here how a global health device like sin taxes grew out of Chicago’s microeconomic tradition and, in particular, Becker’s project to redefine economics as a function of individual choice and expand it to non-economic domains. Moreover, I outlined how sin taxes were later decoupled from Becker’s project and redeployed as a key strategy in public health efforts to fight the smoking epidemic in the Global South. This redeployment, I also showed, was accompanied by the introduction of a new model of the smoker—the rational, welfare-maximizing individual—within the international tobacco control field. To conclude, I want to reflect on how this story relates to wider historical accounts about the proliferation of micro-technologies within international development and humanitarian aid. In their writings, Collier, Redfield, and others caution against the familiar and well-rehearsed explanation that this proliferation is the result of a shift from welfare states and the social to markets and the individual (e.g., Collier 2011; Cross, 2013; Redfield 2012). Instead, they suggest that the multiplication of these micro-devices is associated with a rupture in development thought from a macroeconomic concern with large, national physical infrastructure projects to a microeconomic focus on the investments in human capital (Collier et al. 2017; see also Reubi 2016). The story of sin taxes outlined here strongly resonates with this broad historical tableau sketched by Collier and others. To begin with, sin taxes emerge from the reconfiguration of Chicago economics from a macroeconomic discipline concerned with markets as coordinating devices to a microeconomic tradition focused on rational individual behavior. It is worth emphasizing that, in the context of this reconfiguration, markets and individual choices stand in contrast to each other. Indeed, this might come as a surprise to some readers for whom markets and individual choice are necessarily—almost naturally—associated. Furthermore, it is critical to realize that the shift from mass public information campaigns to sin taxes that marked the field of international tobacco control in the late 1990s was not a shift from the social to the individual, but rather a change in the concept of the individual. It was a move away from an individual for whom knowledge always and automatically triggered certain actions to an individual who could decide not to act on knowledge and prioritize other elements such as money and pleasure instead. Last, the strong emphasis placed on individual choice in both Becker’s attempts to reform economic thought and global health efforts to curb smoking should not be interpreted as the death of the social. Indeed, in echo of Collier’s (2011) work on the post-Soviet social, the notion of the social or society has remained important for both projects, albeit in different forms. Thus, for Becker (1997:150), sin taxes are “social taxes” that can protect American “society” from the “social harms” associated with rational addictive behaviors, whereas for global health experts, sin taxes are public health “interventions” that can shield developing “societies” from the health and “socio-economic toll” of “21st-century lifestyles” (WHO 2010:vii, 37).

Acknowledgements

This essay draws on research funded through a Wellcome Trust Society and Ethics Fellowship. The essay also benefited from Stephen Collier and Peter Redfield’s thoughtful comments.

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Image Credits: Featured image of Gary Becker, from The University of Chicago