Politics and economics in global questions about childhood and youth . . . the trouble with numbers

Are we failing in our combined research endeavours to get at the core questions facing children and young people today? What can we expect to do, and how? Recent global events seem to suggest that we should be paying increasing attention to questions of politics and economics and how they affect children and young people, but how are we ever to shift the dominant paradigms of childhood and youth in political economy terms? Are our combined endeavours in the study of children likely to have an effect?

Writing an editorial can be tricky, knowing that it will be read in six months’ time. At the time of sitting down to write, August 2011, parts of London, and other cities in England, experienced four days of ‘rioting’ and ‘looting’. There were unprecedented levels of violence against property, mostly involving looting of consumer goods. Much of it involved young people and children. Some of the violence was unquestioningly sickening to see (and see it we did, because it was relayed via TV and internet screens, from CCTV footage and mobile phone filming – and this was beamed around the world). Some of the violence was directed at people. Tragically, three young men were killed when a car was driven directly at them, as they attempted to defend their small business, in a predominantly Muslim part of Birmingham. Then, just as quickly as it started, it stopped. The father of one of the victims, in his dignified plea for peace to be restored, was probably (partly) responsible for the cessation of violence. And all over the country, community residents of all ages, young as well as old, joined together to clean up and to reclaim their streets.

What was novel about the looting? There have been sporadic (actually rather rare) outbreaks of street disorder and looting over the course of the 20th century involving young people, often at times of high unemployment and stress in the economy. What was novel, was the use of new media – both the rioters and the police were able to put various new technologies to use via social networks – the looters putting out messages, the police tapping into them to track them. New media was also involved in informing us about what happened. A vast amount of real and virtual print (newspapers, internet, Twitter, blogs) has been expended in trying to understand and explain, with claims and counterclaims made about criminality, children, youth, consumption, inequality, poverty, violence, morality and ethics. For about 10 days (for the news moves on very quickly), the TV and radio blared with journalists, politicians and commentators discussing what has gone wrong, claiming that society is ‘sick’ or ‘broken’. Those on the political right blame parents for lack of discipline of their children and a decline in moral standards, and ‘liberal’ education systems for failing to instil in children a sense of responsibility and self-control. Commentators on the left blame consumerism, and rising inequality, as well as a lack of opportunities for young people. The UK’s leading sociologist, Zigmunt Bauman, called the rioters ‘defective and disqualified consumers’ (Bauman, 2011) – linking to his arguments about ‘flawed consumers’, which explain how the expansion of consumer society inevitably involves the pathologization and marginalization of those on low incomes (Bauman, 1998). However, notably few commentators go so far as to connect explanations to capitalism and the relentless drive for the production and acquisition of material goods.

The response from the criminal justice system has been draconian. Over the following days unprecedented numbers of people were arrested and ‘processed’ very rapidly by the court system. Hefty custodial sentences were handed out to offenders who had committed crimes that on other days of the year would have been regarded as trivial (or not crimes at all). It was the scale that mattered here – of people, and goods. There was, and still is, talk of punishing not only the offenders themselves, but their families – by removing their welfare payments and their entitlements to subsidized housing, evicting them from their homes. These responses were presaged by Wacquant in his book Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Wacquant, 2009), which focuses on France and the USA. The UK government invariably turns to the US for advice on policing matters. But the US incarcerates the highest percentage of its population in the developed world, and the US is where, as any sociologist of education will tell you, more government money is spent on prisons than on schools.

What is a sociologist of childhood to say about all of this? The Mayor of London claimed that he had heard ‘too much sociological explanation and not enough condemnation’. But we can point out that the vast majority of young people were not involved in rioting or looting, and with the benefit of hindsight, the numbers involved were relatively small. We can point to the characteristics of the people doing the looting, by looking at statistics of those processed by the courts. Some of the looters were parents themselves. Some were professional people with jobs. But the overwhelming majority of those prosecuted were male (90%), and they were young, the vast majority under the age of 25. Twenty-two percent were under the age of 18. Analysis showed that the majority lived in the most deprived parts of some English cities. However, there are very deprived parts of England, as well as Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, that did not experience any trouble. We can also point to the political and economic context. At the time of the riots, global stock markets were in free fall. There is a general societal sense of unease that MPs, police and bankers lack their own morality and ethics – one left-wing organization has tried to shift the focus from ‘feral youth’ to what they call the ‘feral elite’.

This is, of course, a parochial concern, happily for the rest of the world. The riots and looting were sparked by a protest in Tottenham, north London, following the shooting by police of a young man. His family organized a small protest at the lack of information and communication with the police, and then the trouble escalated. But globally, 2011 was a story of protest and political struggle around the world, as the world economy shifts and stutters. Much of this protest involves young people. Parts of the world try to assert their freedom and claim their place in modernity. The ‘Arab Spring’ has led to the overthrow of authoritarian regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and violent political struggle is ongoing in other countries. We hear less about protest and political struggle in the rapidly expanding Asian economies and about Latin America, and hardly anything at all about sub-Saharan African countries. As European states retrench in the face of the banking crisis and economic recession, cuts to welfare budgets have meant the withdrawal of services aimed at helping the most vulnerable. In England, youth services have been particularly badly affected, with some local authorities wiping out youth services altogether. There have been protests in many other European countries in response to austerity measures – in Greece, in Spain and in Portugal, where the protest movement is called the Geraçao à Rasca, which translates as the ‘Desperate Generation’. Unemployment rates among young people are very high in these countries – for example, 44% in Spain, 36% in Greece, 28% in Portugal. Should we be asking, what place is there in the world for this ‘desperate generation’? Is it possible to look across countries and states at what is happening to young people, to try to make some global links? As childhood researchers, we should be in a good position to address this question, but do we need to engage in a broader interdisciplinary endeavour than we have done so far? At the heart of the problems lie questions of economics and politics. But what has happened to economics, as a discipline? Is it the right place to look? After all, it is economists that advise and control financial institutions, economists that policy-makers and NGOs pay most attention to, yet they often get things wrong, and they tend to neglect crucial aspects of social life, like culture, social norms and values, that affect how people act, and have a very restricted view of what constitutes human welfare – with an over-emphasis on material aspects of well-being.

How do economists understand children, or data from or about children? Nancy Folbre, feminist economist, put it like this: ‘children tumble out of every category economists try to put them in. They have been described as consumer durables providing a flow of utility to their parents, investment goods providing income, and public goods with both positive and negative externalities. . . . However we categorise children, we know that the consequences of raising them are changing’ (Folbre, 1994: 86). For many years, Folbre’s work has emphasized how mainstream economic analysis omits the non-market work of women and children and marginalizes them. This led me on to thinking about mainstream economics more generally, and how it deals with data and people, morality and ethics. In fact, mainstream economics continues to categorize children in the ways that Folbre described in 1994 – perhaps more than ever now – simply as future human capital. Few mainstream economists seem to acknowledge the point that Folbre makes, that ‘Children are also people, with certain rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ (Folbre, 1994: 86). However, the failure of economists to predict the current global financial crisis has led to some critique within the discipline itself. Tony Atkinson, retired micro-economist, has recently suggested that mainstream economics has lost sight of its historical roots as essentially a ‘moral’ subject focused on welfare (Atkinson, 2011). Robert Shiller (an economist) and Virginia Shiller (a psychologist) point out that mainstream economics has, over the course of the 20th century, become increasingly specialized, technical and complex, with elaborate statistical techniques, and less and less focused on ‘how the world works’. They point out that ‘countless critics from outside the profession think the models economists relied upon were too rarified or specialised to allow most economists to see the big picture and to sound the alarm about problems that were developing’ (Shiller and Shiller, 2011: 171). They see emerging signs ‘of greater interest in a balance between specialisation and knowledge of findings in other fields, including history, psychology, and sociology’ (Shiller and Shiller, 2011: 174) and call upon those in positions of influence within economics to encourage ‘broader perspectives which bring together various approaches to allow a more sophisticated assessment of economic problems’ (Shiller and Shiller, 2011: 174). They conclude that ‘The real imperative for researchers is that efforts need to be redoubled to encourage cross-fertilisation and broad-spectrum thinking, driven by the broad moral purposes of improving human welfare’ (Shiller and Shiller, 2011: 175). This is not a call for economics to invade other disciplines, but for there to be a constructive dialogue.

How might we bring children in? Children and young people do appear in national statistics, still broadly as outcomes, though the past 25 years of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child has focused attention on children in the here-and-now, and the lived realities of children around the world. From numerous small-scale research studies, many of which have been published in Childhood, we now have pictures of aspects of children’s lives that were hitherto underresearched. This is undoubtedly important. However, we have not tended to publish papers by economists, not least because our epistemologies and conceptualizations of children differ fundamentally, and economists rarely seem to attempt generational analyses. The implications for children of inequality, the increasing marketization of all aspects of social life (including matters previously dealt with by the state, such as formal education and health), the payment of welfare benefits conditional on parents’ and children’s behaviour and the increasingly punitive approaches to people who do not fit the supposed ideal type of child/young person, which lead to incarceration and further social exclusion – all these are questions of global relevance that economists, political philosophers and sociologists could usefully join forces to explore.

What are the difficulties and possibilities of ‘making qualitative research count’? Can small-scale qualitative ethnographic research make connections with large-scale survey data in a constructive way that also links to broad political-economic processes? Some have suggested (in relation to the English riots) that we need to start listening more closely to the people involved (Day, 2011) but there are limits to the possibilities here. As Bourdieu noted in Weight of the World, ‘The perfectly commendable wish to go see things in person, close up, sometimes leads people to search for the explanatory principles of observed realities where they are not to be found . . . namely, at the site of observation itself’ (Bourdieu, 1999: 181). In a footnote, he pointed out that ‘The division among disciplines – ethnology, sociology, history and economy – translates itself back into separated segments that are totally inadequate to the objects of study’ (Bourdieu, 1999: 181). He suggested that ethnographers are ‘incapable of grasping the mechanisms whose effects they record’, while studies that aim to be systematic ‘tend to chose more or less arbitrarily among the complexity of facts to construct “stylized” models’. This is a bleak observation, and the challenge is to try to marry these two, in the interests of better understanding the economic and political processes affecting children and young people around the world. Can we link Folbre’s assertion that ‘children are also people, with certain rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ not only with the global situation of children and young people, but also with the unfortunate events in England in August 2011? Young people themselves are making important contributions to the debates – but will they be heard, and will their views be acted upon? To what extent do government plans anywhere in the world offer children a future? The point here is that not only are children people, they are also entitled to prospects and ‘a place at the table’ (Watson, 2009). This is completely missing in the preoccupations that economists seem to have with balances of payment and repayment of national debts, and the effects of the crisis on present-day adults – in terms of mortgage payments, interest rates, pensions and so on.