I want to express my sincere appreciation to Wits University, and in particular, to the Demography and Population Studies Programme for their initiative in convening this annual lecture series. It is my distinct privilege to deliver this, the inaugural lecture, and I greatly appreciate the ability to respond to the tease in the topic on “the role of ivory towers”.
South Africa is fortunate to have so many excellent universities that we must, of necessity, treasure and further develop them. Part of what those of us ‘outside of the towers’ have to do is to repeatedly ask the tough questions about the performance of our universities.
Universities are places of learning, places that distil knowledge and places that produce new knowledge. They play a critical role both in the way in which they enable students to access knowledge and in the way in which academics collaborate to take the frontiers of knowledge further. Because of this important role, societies afford universities a special status, a status to pursue academic freedom. Societies do this because in return, they expect universities to advance the collective interests of society. And so even a person who has never been to a university can appreciate the role that universities play when they see progress in society. In some ways, this is the social compact that universities sign up to: teach and produce new knowledge that benefits all of society and in turn we will give you the freedom to think, to write, to teach and to learn.
There is much score set on rankings in academia, I do not want to be drawn into that debate, but I am of the view that our universities must be encouraged to respond appropriately to the myriad challenges facing them. And so, it is important that our universities answer questions – and we can and should debate the measures - such as:
- Are they doing enough to create a new cadre of intellectuals?
- Do they insist on creating new frontiers for human endeavour?
- Do they actually offer an avenue for social mobility and pierce the veil of race, gender and class?
- Do they assist in producing the kinds of skilled people who can improve on the quality of decision-making in the nation, the firm, academia and across our borders?
My lecture tonight will aim to ask these difficult questions of universities and academia in general. I will also ask these questions in the particular context of demography and population studies, both because these fields of study are central to the human condition and because it is a particular passion of mine.
What measures should we use to judge universities? I choose to start the inaugural Isibalo lecture by reflecting on two general concerns about the tenor of our discourse in contemporary South Africa. The first is that it does not seek to persuade – the laziness of debate manifests in first attaching an epithet and then pillorying anybody whose views you cannot contest. The second is that there is a dearth of empirical evidence in argument.
I sometimes follow debates taking place far away, on a range of economic policy matters. Let me touch on just two that are of interest – the first is between James Galbraith (son of John Kenneth Galbraith, Professor at University of Texas at Austin, Author of The Predator State) and Paul Krugman (Nobel Laureate, Prof at Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton). Galbraith writes, “It is true, of course, that economic-policy discussions are magnets for cranks. But from this it does not follow, and in fact it is not true, that all “serious” economists hold on to some single position. It is even more absurd to suppose that one gains access to this wisdom by passing an exam in algebra”. To which Krugman responds, “Economics is at least partly about quantities and their relationships; so you can’t make sense of it unless you are willing to do some arithmetic and even some algebra to make sure that the stories you tell hang together – and that they are consistent with the evidence.”
Theirs is a fascinating debate that has continued, for the past 17 years or so, about how much quantitative analysis should be done to inform economic policy-making– both agree that it has to, the debate is on how much needs to be done.
A second strand of debate deals with the work by Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart in their book titled, “This Time is Different”. They argued that economies slow down appreciably when debt levels exceed 90% of GDP. Their arguments were apparently used as the theoretical and empirical underpinnings of the austerity programmes in Europe and the US. A group of economists at University of Massachusetts at Amherst looked at their data and found that they had made some basic errors in the calculations. Once the discovery was made and published, there was a huge outcry by a number of economists, including Paul Krugman, about the incorrect policy options that flowed from their failed research.
In both cases, the arguments are about datasets that are transparent and where the connection between them and policy are obviously made and clearly understood. When last, and on what issue have we had a discussion or debate in South Africa that even comes close to being informed by data?
But it is also in the style of argument. The author Tony Judt, who was an exceedingly impressive debater, explains the development of his own dialectic ability thus:
In Cambridge, you were not exactly taught: you just read books and talked about them. There was considerable variety among my teachers there: old-fashioned, liberal English empiricist historians; methodologically sensitive intellectual historians; and there were still a few economic historians of the old interwar left-wing school. In Cambridge my doctoral supervisors, far from inducting me into historical methodologies, kept disappearing from under me. The supervisor to whom I had been assigned, David Thomson, died shortly after I met him for the first time. My second supervisor was a very sweet, elderly historian of Third Republic of France, J.P.T Bury, who served excellent sherry but knew little about my subject. I don’t believe we met more than three times over the course of my doctoral work. Thus I was completely undirected for the first year of doctoral studies in Cambridge, 1969-970.
Not only did I have to come up with the subject of my thesis, but I had to invent from the whole cloth the problématique, the questions that it would make sense to ask and the criteria I should invoke when answering them: why did socialism fail to fulfil its own promises? Why did socialism in France fall short of the achievements of northern European social democracy? Why was there no uprising or revolution in France in 1919, despite expectations that there would be and(?) radical upheaval elsewhere? Why was Soviet communism so much better able in those years to inherit the mantle of the French Revolution than the locally-grown socialism of republican France? Deep in the background were the implicit questions about the triumph of the far right in the 1930s. Was the rise of fascism and National Socialism simply to be understood as a failure of the left? That was how I thought about it at the time; only much later did these spectres of question take on life for me.
How do we produce scholars of such diligence and equip them to argue differently. Forcefully, if needs be, but differently from the banality of the present? Statistics SA produces a total of 263 statistical releases a year (of which 48 are Population and Social Statistics). Many of these are now impressively released in a highly accessible application based format. The profound tragedy is that they are used exceedingly infrequently in debate, and from time-to-time some of them are used quite incorrectly, in a contest of point-scoring.
This is a deep problem, but actually not one that has its genesis in universities. A bigger problem is that quantitative skills are exceedingly poorly taught in primary schools, there is active discouragement of learning in these disciplines at high schools, so that when people enter universities prepared to study quantities of whatever description, they are already such a small minority, that when they leave the universities, they walk into the highest paying jobs in the private sector and so are lost to the task of skills replication. In 2010, just
0.74 percent of those who wrote matric got an A for mathematics. But, I digress.
I have been involved in the policy process, primarily in economics, over the past twenty years. A reflection, with the benefit of hindsight, would not be entirely out of place. Let me share some of the early initiatives we embarked on – to confirm the points about the divisions, and the absence of empirical evidence.
- One of the first major policy explorations was undertaken by the MERG (MacroEconomic Research Group), which produced a 330 page document in 1993, entitled Making Democracy Work. The project was interesting as a training ground for young economists, and as an attempt as a consortium of effort across a number of universities, both in South Africa and abroad. The project consisted of a number of papers, published in 9 chapters. The first problem was that the policy content was pretty disparate, perhaps because we did not yet understand the point raised by James Galbraith that, “and it is not in fact true, that all ‘serious’ economists hold some single position.” Because of the absence of a coherent narrative and supporting data, the project failed to live up to expectations. Eventually, an Australian econometrician was found to try and present some macroeconomic simulations – these keeled over at the first critical touch. Nobody would admit to the real scale of the difficulties and the project was seen as published. Period. It was actually never adopted by any movement.
- While the MERG process was taking shape, we also ran a harder policy process “without numbers”, called “Ready to Govern” in May 1992. The process comprised a few policy statements, untested and unsupported by data, that served us well in occupying policy space. Activists could read the statements, align with them and use them in the course of general arguments that preceded our first democratic elections.
- And even while the MERG was running, we moved as a Tripartite Alliance to develop a Reconstruction and Development Programme, first published in January 1994. The RDP became the extended version of the ANC’s first election manifesto. The RDP will always occupy a very special place in our political history. Yet, it includes commitments that were quite unsupported – how did we arrive at a figure of 200 000 housing units a year? Or could we actually have modelled the commitment to create 300 000 to 500 000 non-agricultural jobs a year, at that stage? Tough issues were kicked into touch. The RDP document argues (at paragraph 6.5.7) “the existing ratios of the deficit, borrowing and taxation to GNP are part of our macroeconomic problem. In meeting the financing needs of the RDP and retaining macro stability during its implementation, particular attention will have to be paid to these ratios.”
Pretty vague, as you can see, which only served to merely defer any discussion of the problems.
- We carried the RDP into government in 1994 as a core programme. Among the expenditures was the equalisation of salaries and pensions – all on the expenditure side. We had no clear idea what the contingent liabilities of the state were; no concomitant increase in revenues and a huge gaping deficit to start with. Few South Africans knew how difficult that early period was, or how close we were to approaching the IMF cap in hand for a standby facility, and how concerned we were about the impact that such a move would have on our hard-won sovereignty. Perhaps, we should have used this period to tell the full story of hardship, to win political support for the tough economic decisions contained in GEAR; perhaps then things would have been different. With the benefit of hindsight, perhaps we should have, it may still have rent the soul of a nascent democracy, but perhaps we should have placed the data before the nation – and explained why a double digit deficit, in the absence of access to external funding other than the IMF would have been the road to ruin – but we did not. And trust broke down.
The two concerns are that we failed, and perhaps still fail to appreciate the argument by Paul Krugman that “Economics is at least partly about quantities and their relationships; so you can’t make sense of it unless you are willing to do some arithmetic and even some algebra to make sure that the stories you tell hang together – and that they are consistent with the evidence.” And secondly, that rather than persuade and be persuaded, we beat up on each other without listening to argument – words, personalities and perceived ideology still exert more influence than evidence. This is the tragedy.
Statistics, or the lack thereof, accounts for another tragedy. South Africa’s lack of accurate employment and unemployment statistics, particularly for black people between the 1970s and the mid-1990s, had the effect of distorting the public and academic discourse in South Africa. While the level of poverty and inequality were appreciated in the discourse and so were covered extensively in Ready to Govern, there was too little focus on employment policy, on how jobs are created or lost and on the scale of unemployment and underemployment. We missed the fact that by the time democracy arrived, the two most labour intensive sectors (mining and agriculture) were already bleeding jobs. In fact, it was only in the 2000s that we began to appreciate the low levels of employment, particularly amongst black people.
But, we are not alone, a number of other countries battle with their own issues. Take the example of Nigeria that last rebased their GDP in 1990. It is anticipated that the upward revision could be as large as 60 percent, shifting per capita GDP from $1 600 to $2600. Pause and reflect on the scale of adjustment necessary. What policies would be deemed appropriate for a middle income country with a per capita GDP of $2600?
We must also agree that the datasets need to be so organised that they inform appropriately – so, questions from the user have to include, “what do I need to know? And “what may the statistics mask?” Let me, by way of example draw from a very recent work called “An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions” by Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen. They write,
The comparison between Bangladesh and India is a good place to start. During the last twenty years or so, India has grown much richer than Bangladesh; India’s per capita income, already 60% higher than Bangladesh’s in 1990, was estimated to be about double that of Bangladesh by 2011. However, during the same period, Bangladesh has overtaken India in terms of a wide range of basic social indicators, including life expectancy, child survival, enhanced immunisation rates, reduced fertility rates, and even some (not all) schooling indicators. For instance, life expectancy was more or less the same for both countries in 1990, but was estimated to be four years higher in Bangladesh than in India by 2010 (69 and 65 years respectively). Similarly, child mortality, a tragic indicator, was estimated to be about 20 percent higher in Bangladesh than in India in 1990, but has fallen rapidly in Bangladesh to now being 25 percent lower than in India by 2011. Most social indicators now look better in Bangladesh than in India, despite Bangladesh having less than half of India’s income.
So, what is really happening in India? The authors also argue,
India’s record of rapid economic growth in recent decades, particularly in the last ten years or so, has tended to cause some understandable excitement. The living standards of the ‘middle classes’ (which tends to mean the top 20 percent or so of the population by income) have improved well beyond what was expected - or could be anticipated – in the previous decades. But the story is more complex for others such as the rickshaw puller, domestic worker or brick-kiln labourer. For them and other underprivileged groups, the reform period has not been so exciting. It is not their lives have not improved at all, but the pace of change has been excruciatingly slow and has barely altered their abysmal living conditions.
It is also fundamentally important to add the general demographic trends of countries and regions into this increasingly complex arrangement. No discussion of demographics can be complete without some reflection on trends in China. In a paper prepared for Brookings. Feng Wang writes as follows:
Observers of China’s rise, when assessing the implications for global peace and prosperity, have largely focused their attention on the country’s economy, on its energy and resource needs, on the environmental consequences of its rapid expansion, and on the nation’s military buildup and strategic ambitions. Yet, underlying all these dazzling changes and monumental concerns is a driving force that has been seriously underappreciated: China’s changing demography.
With 1.33 billion people, China today remains the world’s most populous country. In a little more than a decade, however, it will for the first time in its long history give up this title, to India. But, even more important, China’s demographic landscape has in recent decades been thoroughly redrawn by unprecedented population changes. These changes will in the future drive the country’s economic and social dynamics, and will redefine its position in the global economy and the society of nations. Taken together, the changes portend a gathering crisis.
One number best characterizes China’s demographics today: 160 million. First, the country has more than 160 million internal migrants who, in the process of seeking better lives, have supplied abundant labor for the nation’s booming economy. Second, more than 160 million Chinese are 60 years old or older. Third, more than 160 million Chinese families have only one child, a product in part of the country’s three-decade-old policy limiting couples to one child each. (The total populations of countries like Japan and Russia do not reach 160 million; Bangladesh’s population is roughly equal to that number.)
But there are a few other numbers that also concern Chinese policymakers. By 2030, China will have just over 200 million college graduates. What kind of jobs will China need to create? It acknowledges that with such a large number of graduates, it will not be possible to merely assemble products of the design of others, nor will they get by with imitation. China will just have to be an innovator and producer of leading edge goods. This means that they not only have to invest massively in R&D, but they also have to build brands for exports and they will have to significantly stimulate domestic demand. The demographic output has become a leading indicator for unlocking a chain of highly significant economic policy choices.
With this wide array of information about trends elsewhere in the world, and against the backdrop of our own painful experiences of debates that appear to be premised on binary exclusions and where debate is too seldom informed by data, how do we begin a shift, in what we know and understand, how do we engage and persuade, and how are decisions made.
South Africa’s demographic profile and trends are only a major feature of our policy discourse in the past fifteen years. Ironically, it has been the HIV epidemic that prompted a closer scrutiny of our demographic trends. Today, we have a broader understanding of our demography, yet we still know too little in certain areas.
We know that our population growth started declining in the 1970s, we know that fertility rates amongst African women fell sharply in the 1990s, we know that urbanisation accelerated in the 1980s as the influx control system broke down, and we know that the workforce has expanded far more rapidly than overall population growth in the past twenty years. We also know that one of the most striking features of the post-apartheid period is the rise of women in the labour force and the rise in the proportion of women working. Yet, we often do not know why these things happened.
We know too little about rural to rural migration. We know too little about what young people do when they leave school without completing a matric. We know too little about the elderly. We know precious little about why marriage rates have fallen so rapidly in the past twenty years.
Demography and statistics are not just about having a good sense of the numbers. The first task is to unpack the statistics to give a broad narrative that is consistent with other indicators. The second order task is to understand the numbers, to understand how migration works and changes over time. The third order question is to answer the policy questions such as how do we cope with rising numbers of urban people; what do we do about children living without adult parents and so forth.
Universities, these ivory towers that we speak of, play critical roles on all of these tasks. They provide the methodologies to get accurate statistics. They help analyse the data. They build tools to allow society to understand the data and they help answer the difficult questions about what society should do about a particular trend or development.
To play this role in society, universities need layers of expertise, built on top of each other over a long period of time. Such expertise is not created overnight. Knowledge and the accumulation of knowledge is a long process. Academics have to stand on the shoulders of those who have come before. They have to do this in ways that both recognise and accept the stature and quality of work but is also curious enough to push the boundaries further and further.
This is a challenging process, requiring institutional memory, humility to accept what has gone before and the yearning to find answers to unanswered questions. Universities are special places that are able to harness this energy to produce new knowledge. On the one hand, universities are independent and protected from the pressures prevalent in societies. On the other hand, universities are an integral part of societies, drawing both inspiration and talent from their communities. There are very few institutions that are given this special role in a society.
It is up to universities to use this role wisely and sensible and not to err either by being overly hamstrung by social commentary or by being aloof from society. If universities can keep this delicate balance, then they deserve their ivory tower status. Society will not just permit their freedom and independence, but robustly protect their freedom.
Ladies and gentlemen, it has been an honour to be able to address you tonight. I hope that a small way, we can collectively raise the level of discourse in our country, adopt a greater appreciation for the numbers and their associated relationships and approach debates with the desire to listen and learn, not just to steamroll. This requires better data and more informed analysis but it also requires a rising maturity and humility that is an integral part of the knowledge process.
I thank you.
