Why does the social impact world treat us like robots?
Last week was a bit of a rollercoaster. It really tested the benefits of my daily mindfulness and meditation practice. The new variant detected in India with two mutations has escalated the case count to previously unthinkable levels — and has started to affect my extended family. Meanwhile, in the US, the Senate passed a bill to fight Anti-Asian hate crimes — a rare bipartisan vote in an evenly divided chamber, and former police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of the murder of George Floyd. Here in Canada, the Quebec Superior Court upheld Bill 21, passed by the Coalition Avenir Québec government, which bans public servants from wearing religious symbols at work. Neither Jagmeet Singh nor Justin Trudeau spoke out against the new law or committed to fighting the court’s decision. And finally, the Liberal government tabled what is becoming perhaps the most-talked about federal budget in recent history.
Let’s dive into the budget. It was crafted by Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s first woman minister of finance — a historic moment for our country. The budget had a number of major commitments as well as a range of smaller, below-the-radar investments. From affordable child care to implementing the social finance fund, these are actions that many Canadians, especially across the social impact world, have been working on and calling for for decades.
A mentor once told me: the more complicated and profound the changes, the more basic the questions we should be asking, and that it’s the simplest and most direct questions that cut to the fundamental issues of life. At 739 pages, this budget is a complicated and profound piece of work. So, I have a few basic questions: Who are we? What is inequality? What is care? What is growth? And who decides?
Of all the questions swirling around in my head over the past week though, the question of ‘who are we?’ was perhaps the one that occupied the most space.
What I arrived at is that ‘we’ are not an average; there is no such thing as the average Canadian. Yet so many of our policies, systems and programs are designed around this notion of the average person. In fact, the word ‘average’ occurs about 100 times in the federal budget — from an average $10 a day childcare to businesses having above-average profits, to revenue decline of the average charity, and the impact on the average Canadian worker.
Meanwhile, Todd Rose, head of the Center for Individual Opportunity reminds us that “the most pressing educational, economic, and social mobility challenges we face as a society all stem from a profound lack of understanding about individuals due to our unquestioned acceptance of the myth of average. Today, our institutions of opportunity, from education to the workforce, remain firmly rooted in the misguided belief that group averages are good enough to understand individuals, measure their potential, and nurture their unique talents. They are not.”
So, then, if you’ve designed a policy, service, grant or program to fit the average Canadian, you’ve actually designed it to fit no one.
The hidden tyranny of the average is all around us. They form part of the everyday babble of our life and our work in social impact. We talk about the average amount of student debt, the average hospital wait times, the average GPA, the average salary of executives, the average occupied beds in women’s shelters, the average rate of suicide, the average grant size disbursed. You get the point.
For decades, averaging has been a cornerstone of social services, social policy, and our society. So much so that average has become normal, and the individual became abnormal. As a parent of two, it’s even conditioned in me to worry if my children are not developing according to the average milestones, and it’s caused almost every one of us to feel anxiety when our health, social life, or career deviates too far from the average.
Piers Bierne writes in the American Journal of Sociology that by the dawn of the twentieth century, a majority of social scientists and policymakers around the world were making decisions about people based on the average, resulting in our societies becoming standardized. And in a standardized system, consultation process, program, or service, individuality rarely matters. In a world that privileges averages and standardized metrics, programs, and services, tell me, can this federal budget and our social safety nets set everyone up for a flourishing life?
Has our uniqueness become a burden for the system? Do policymakers, grantmakers and service providers really think they can understand individuals by ignoring their individuality? Will budget 2021 deliver us new programs based on old principles of efficiency, standardization and the average person? If so, what good is that?
For insights on these questions, I turned to Gord Tulloch and Sarah Schulman, who have worked in British Columbia’s disability sector for a number of years and recently co-authored a book called ‘The Trampoline Effect: Redesigning our Social Safety Nets’. The book is provocative and is one of my favourite reads so far this year. I hosted Gord and Sarah at Future of Good for an in-depth interview. You can read the condensed version or watch the full interview (trust me, it’s worth watching it in full).
If we want a society in which everyone leads flourishing lives and realizes one’s full potential, then we must create policies, programs and institutions that are responsive to individuality — not the myth of average.
Vinod Rajasekaran
Publisher & CEO
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