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Does providing care for a grandchild impact volunteerism?

Grandparents provide a significant amount of care for grandchildren in the United States. Some grandparents provide occasional care, others provide daycare while the grandchild’s parents are at work, and others are fully raising their grandchildren. Providing regular care for grandchildren is usually not considered to be “formal volunteering” (generally defined as unpaid work for an organization outside of one’s family, such as an educational or charitable organization), but it certainly represents a significant time investment on the part of grandparents. We were intrigued by the lack of research investigating how grandparenting—a type of informal volunteer work—might affect one’s ability to do formal volunteering. Specifically, how might different types of care for grandchildren affect grandparents’ volunteerism?

We thought that providing care to a grandchild might mean exposure to more volunteer opportunities through a grandchild’s school, religious organization, or extracurricular activities. However, we also wondered whether the health and economic resources of grandparents doing the most intensive caregiving might be taxed to the point where they were less able to volunteer.

To study this relationship, we used data from the University of Michigan’s Health and Retirement Study (HRS). The HRS is a nationally-representative survey of US adults over the age of 50, and is conducted every two years. Because the HRS includes a large sample size (we are able to analyze over 13,000 people in our sample), it allowed us the ability to examine grandparents engaged in different types of grandchild care. We used data from the 2004 HRS survey to compare four different grandparent groups: those who did not provide regular grandchild care, those who had provided limited care for a grandchild (defined as approximately one to ten hours of care per week over the previous two years), those who provided substantial care for a grandchild (averaging more than 10 hours per week over the previous two years), and those who were raising a grandchild in their household.

Our results showed clear differences between the grandparent groups. As shown in the bar chart below, grandparents who provided substantial care for a grandchild (but whose grandchild did not live with them) were most likely to be engaged in volunteer activity. On the other hand, grandparents who were raising their grandchildren were least likely to do any volunteering. About 23% of grandparents raising grandchildren were engaged in volunteering, versus 32% of grandparents not providing regular grandchild care, 37% of grandparents providing limited care, and 47% of grandparents providing substantial (but non-residential) care.

Because there are known differences between these groups, we used statistical modeling techniques that accounted for differences in factors such as demographics, economic status, health, religious involvement, and household characteristics. We found that grandparents raising grandchildren had lower economic well-being and poorer health, and that these factors explained some—but not all—of their lower likelihood of volunteering. Even after accounting the potential differences between groups, grandparents raising grandchildren had the lowest likelihood of volunteering, and grandparents providing substantial care for a non-residential grandchild had the highest likelihood of volunteering. In fact, the difference between these two groups was quite large: grandparents providing substantial care for a non-resident grandchild had almost two times higher odds of volunteering than those raising a grandchild.

We were concerned that perhaps it was not grandchild care itself that was leading grandparents to do more volunteer work. Instead, perhaps these individuals are “super helpers,” especially likely to take on both informal family work as well as formal volunteer work. In order to better understand whether taking on a caregiving role for grandchildren is what was responsible for differences in volunteering, we needed to follow individuals over time, observing their volunteerism both before and after assuming grandchild care. Fortunately, the fact that the HRS re-interviews respondents every two years allowed us to examine changes in volunteer behavior between 2004 and 2008 for those who did not begin caring for a grandchild and those who did. Results show that those who started providing limited or substantial care for a non-resident grandchild also increased their formal volunteer work, whereas volunteering declined over time for those who did not begin providing care for a grandchild.

We found that there is a complex relationship between providing care to a grandchild and volunteering. Providing care for a non-residential grandchild may expand grandparents’ social networks and volunteer opportunities through involvement with their grandchildren’s activities. Grandparents raising their grandchildren, on the other hand, are engaged in a more time-demanding and intensive form of care. Although this care may expose them to more volunteer opportunities, it may also limit their ability to take on formal volunteer work. Research suggests that formal volunteering is associated with a variety of beneficial outcomes, including greater health, life satisfaction, and self-esteem, in addition to lower depressive symptoms and mortality risk; consequently, several recent initiatives have sought to increase the number of older adults who are volunteering. Grandparents raising grandchildren, a group already at risk of poorer health and economic outcomes, may be a group less able to engage in volunteer opportunities. Thus, the next question is—how can we help these grandparents reap the benefits of volunteerism?

 

Image Credit: “Walk” by Matlachu. Public Domain via Pixabay.

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The scales of justice and the establishment

Reports that luminaries of the ‘establishment,’ including Archbishop Carey, were queuing up to write letters directly to the Director of Public Prosecutions in support of Bishop Peter Ball, who was eventually convicted of numerous sex offences, is hardly a revelation. Bishops of the Church of England move in the rarefied circles of the establishment, such as the London clubs. Bishop Ball’s influential friends promoted the interests of their friend. What else are friends for? No doubt, those who wrote in Bishop Ball’s defence did so in good faith and were, hopefully, as astounded by his eventual confession as the rest of us were outraged.

What should shake us out of our complacency, and perhaps our self–righteousness, is that when threatened by prosecution, not all accused people enter the criminal justice fray on equal footing. Even the lowliest of us may well have friends who seek to influence the course of justice. An experience common amongst police officers is that having arrested someone for some commonplace transgression, they find themselves surrounded by all manner of friends and relations of the accused pleading their innocence. These entreaties are rarely listened to. Sometimes, fearing an attempt to release the arrested person from custody by force, the police will whisk away their captive. Sometimes, arrest can result in a full–blown riot. Yet, even a riot does not exert the influence of a carefully crafted letter from an archbishop, Member of Parliament (Lords or Commons), or other establishment figure.

It doesn’t stop there. When prosecuting a member of the establishment, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) will brace itself to face the legal ‘heavy artillery’ that will ensure the best possible defence. The accused will be accompanied in any interview by well qualified lawyers, wise to the wiles of the police to elicit self–incrimination and advising their client at every turn. Once the person is charged, the defence will demand the disclosure not only of evidence in the case, but also anything else that might discredit the prosecution. The police will need to assemble an investigative team capable of resisting the unrelenting scrutiny that is supposed to be part and parcel of our adversary system of trial, but is capable of exploitation only by those with the resources to do so. If it comes to trial, then the defence barrister will be a Queen’s Counsel, supported by the full entourage of junior counsel, solicitors and private investigators. Influential people and their friends are doing nothing improper. They are simply making full use of the safeguards that are designed to protect us all from over–zealous policing.

“the scales of justice, though equally applied to both cases, will be tipped to the latter’s disadvantage”

The police and CPS know all this and they can work out that they will need to assemble resources to equal those of the defence, with the consequential drain on the budget. To pass the test that the CPS is mandated to apply to all prosecutions — that there must be a better than evens probability of conviction — will be correspondingly more daunting when a member of the establishment is accused of criminality. Hence, for those who have so much to lose, the scales of justice are tipped to their advantage. By contrast, a penniless welfare dependent, perhaps suffering a drink or drug habit, with a string of previous convictions will have meagre resources with which to defend himself (or more rarely, herself) and, therefore, is more likely to plead guilty, knowing their situation is hapless. Hence, the scales of justice, though equally applied to both cases, will be tipped to the latter’s disadvantage.

Perhaps none of this is very surprising; after all, ‘it’s the rich wot gets the pleasure and the poor wot gets the blame’. However, do not imagine that the scales of justice are tipped only in favour of bishops, members of parliament, et al; they can be tipped equally effectively by those with enough resources to protect their reputation. Local politicians, members of statutory authorities, local notable businesspeople, well–connected professionals and, yes, even academics, are more able to influence the criminal justice system to their advantage.

This is the reality that lies behind the scandals that Justice Lowell and her colleagues on the Statutory Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse will be delving into. However, they will also experience the influences that enable highly–placed, well–connected people to remain, if not hidden, then obscured from view. Those influential people will mobilise to undermine the authority: to question the competence and independence of its members; the legitimacy of its procedures; and much more besides. Their lawyers will be vigilant in pointing out departures from proper procedures. Witnesses with much to lose will be thoroughly briefed and coached in how to give their evidence with maximum impact. Most of all they will question the credibility of the Inquiry’s witnesses. The impact of these accumulated influences has already been felt in the impossibility of the terms of reference and the shenanigans that have already seen the resignation of two Chairs, even before the Inquiry was commenced. It is likely to result in extended deadlines that will put the Chilcott Inquiry in the shade and in reaching anodyne conclusions, when they are eventually published. Let us hope that Justice Lowell is made of sterner stuff.

Featured image credit: “The Eastern end of Government Offices Great George St, from Parliament Square, Westminster” by Carlos Delgado. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons. 

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The migration crisis: what can trade unions do?

2015 will probably go down as the ‘year of migration’, certainly in Europe. All the contradictions of globalisation – free movement of capital but not free movement of people – were coming to a head. All the ‘blowback’ from Western interventions in the Maghreb and in the Levant were coming home. Europe was overwhelmed and, after a brave stance by Germany and Sweden at the outset of the current ‘migration crisis’, things were back to razor wire barriers and better ‘security.’ Not to be left out Republican presidential candidate in the US, Donald Trump, called for a bigger and better wall between the US and Mexico, to be paid for by the latter. Rational discussion was left behind as panic, xenophobia, racism, and irrationalism came to the fore. This is the main issue of the day, probably across the world.

The other issue we increasingly need to address is the degradation of work and workers’ lives. What began twenty years ago with the term ‘Brazilianisation’ – the global North becoming more like the global South – has now been surpassed by the notion of the precariat. This amalgam of precarity and proletariat refers to the emergence of a new global norm of contingent employment, social risk, and framework life conditions. Working and living is, for most people today in most of the world, losing any notion of security, protection and predictability. In terms of a globally fragmented and disposable labour force it is migrant workers, caught in the quagmire of so-called circular migration, who come up top of the list. They are subject to long hours of dangerous, demanding, and demeaning work and live in permanent fear of dismissal and, potentially deportation. Fortress Europe – most notably in the East – is erecting barriers forcing refugees into clandestinity as another part of a growing informal European precariat.

To the interlocking crisis of migration and precarity we can pose the need for transnational frameworks of governance to the credit of enhanced human, social, and labour rights. Ten or fifteen years ago there was considerable confidence that stable and efficient global governance mechanisms could be put in place. Thus in 2007 the UN sponsored Global Forum on Migration and Development was set up to create such a consensus in the area of migration in relation to the North/South development divide. It soon became clear that there was a wide gulf between this high level rhetoric and the politics and practices of national governments. The whole notion of a ‘rights based’ approach to migration and/or precarious work becomes rather academic in the face of the events of 2015. A formidable transnational movement of uprooted victims of Western generated conflicts in the Maghreb and the Levant is represented in terms of a so-called ‘refugee crisis’ coming out of an inexplicable evil. In place of addressing the economic, political, and social root causes of the current crisis, the shattering of the institutions of one of the world’s most powerful regional organisations is rationalised with reference to this self-inflicted humanitarian calamity. In conjunction with the eventual collapse of the Doha trade talks which began in 2001 it spells the end of global governance as an enlightened development project.

An alternative to governance ‘from above’ – which it is hard in the current climate of moral panic and paralysis of institutional capacity to have much confidence in – we might counterpose a governance ‘from below’ as it were. If we look back across Europe in 2015 we see that in relation to the plight of the refugees, it is most often groups within civil society who have responded positively to the humanitarian crisis.

Trade Unions have a particular responsibility in terms of integrating those workers who come from beyond their national boundaries. One instinct for these representatives of national labour forces is to join with others in a protectionist and exclusionary rhetoric and practice. We have seen over the last decade a number of trade union movements respond very positively towards migrant and precarious workers on the basis of the old trade union principle that “an injury to one is an injury to all.” The stakes are high today and the construction of a democratic alternative to Fortress Europe is an urgent task.

Featured image credit: Syrians and Iraqi refugees arrive at Skala Sykamias Lesvos Greece, 2015’by Ggia. CC BY-SA-4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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Legal hurdles to the Affordable Care Act

Since the Affordable Care Act was signed into law in 2010, it has withstood—and overcome—a storm of legal hurdles in the past five and a half years. Lawrence Jacobs and Theda Skocpol, authors of the newly-published third edition of Health Care Reform and American Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know, provide insight into the legal challenges it faced, including the Supreme Court ruling in 2015.

Big legal challenges to Affordable Care made for riveting political drama from March 2010 to June 2012, snaking their way through the federal courts to a knife-edge five to four Supreme Court decision upholding the landmark law. In a decision that surprised many politicians and pundits who expected a straight partisan outcome, conservative Chief Justice John Roberts joined four moderate to liberal justices in upholding the core parts of health reform. As Roberts explained, “We do not consider whether the Act embodies sound policies. That judgment is entrusted to the Nation’s elected leaders. We ask only whether Congress has the power under the Constitution to enact the challenged provisions.”

What the Court did, in essence, was toss the struggle over Affordable Care right back into the political and electoral arenas, where even the legal fights had been anchored all along. But the 2012 Supreme Court ruling did not eliminate attempts to get the courts to do what elected politicians could not—eviscerate the Affordable Care Act.

Although the political fight over health reform remains front and center, reform opponents also renewed legal challenges and, surprisingly, made it back to the Supreme Court in the 2015 case King v Burwell. With the law’s constitutionality settled in June 2012, opponents took aim at its funding by challenging the distribution of tax subsidies to the millions of Americans who used state exchanges set up by the federal government. Their legal toe-hold lay in one sub-section in a 906 page statute, which said that subsidies would be for purchase on exchanges “established by the state.” Challengers argued that those words meant that federal subsidies could not go to customers in dozens of states where exchanges had been set up by federal authorities after state officials proved unwilling or unable to set up exchanges themselves.

But what might seem like a literal and obvious reading crumbled under the weight of well-established legal rules and precedents. Courts have said in the past that laws are to be interpreted in accordance with their overall aims, not just by focusing on a few words taken out of context. In an unusually strong June 2015 decision, six Supreme Court Justices affirmed that the Affordable Care Act always meant for subsidies to be available in all 50 states, and in doing so, raised the bar for future conservative challenges. The Court declined to say that the executive branch has made universal subsidies available simply by offering its own interpretation of an ambiguous provision; instead the Court majority ruled that Congress always intended the subsidies to go to states relying on federal exchanges, as well as to states that built their own exchanges. This means the issue is settled: even if a Republican President takes office in the future, he or she will not be able to deny subsidies merely by issuing a new administrative ruling. Congress would have to vote to overturn the subsidies—and take responsibility before the American people.

“Tea Party rally to stop the 2010 health care reform bill” by Fibonacci Blue. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

In short, despite some huffing and puffing about the sloppiness of Congress in writing and proofreading the text of the Affordable Care Act, the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling dismissed the challengers’ focus on just four words. Following long precedents, the Court majority looked at the law as a whole and noted that universally available subsidies were necessary to make health insurance affordable in working insurance markets. Without subsidies, the Court noted, insurance markets in many states would go into a “death spiral,” and that cannot be what Congress intended.

Of course, legal challenges to the Affordable Care Act have an effect even when they ultimately lose in court. Legal challenges by right-wing opponents of health reform have been part of an overall political strategy to mobilize partisans and convince worried voters that health reform is uncertain or dangerous. They have attracted media coverage and may have spread false public beliefs and stoked continuing grassroots resistance.

In the lead-in to the 2012 Supreme Court case, for instance, shrill warnings about a “massive new middle-class tax” supposedly imposed by the individual mandate amounted to fabrications not unlike the false scary claims about “death panels” deployed in the 2010 elections. In truth, the mandate applies only to a small number of Americans out of each 100—only to people who do not have health insurance through work or a government program, or who cannot afford to purchase coverage with help from generous tax credits. There are exemptions from the mandate for people who have religious objections or who cannot afford a plan. And here’s the real kicker: the Affordable Care Act does not classify the failure to obtain insurance as a crime, and the Internal Revenue Service is not allowed to impose liens or levies on people who do not comply. The fine itself is small, and compliance is basically voluntary. This is the truth of the matter, but it did not prevent challenges to the individual mandate from shaping false media coverage over the course of several years, perhaps in ways advantageous to Republicans.

As for the most recent Supreme Court ruling, Republican leaders publicly bemoaned the 2015 decision, but the truth is that it saved the GOP from a no-win explosion its own extreme right-wingers tried to ignite by taking away benefits that millions of Americans (including rank and file Republicans) were already enjoying. Had the Court cut off many subsidies, millions of Americans who can now afford to buy private health plans in states ranging from Texas and Florida to Ohio and Wisconsin would have suddenly faced the loss of coverage—and losses of that sort make voters angry much more than potential gains make them happy. Non-Tea Party Republican officeholders and leaders in Chambers of Commerce in many states where subsidies were at issue were surely relieved when the Supreme Court left them in place. The ruling may have disappointed all critics of Obamacare by leaving the President’s main domestic policy achievement in place, unhappily for Republicans now and in the future. But it also signaled a setback for right-wing ideological bomb-throwers and gave a boost to Republicans who would like to get on with the business of winning government power to serve practical business interests.

Image Credit: “Northern Inter-counties athletics” by AdamKR. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

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Q&A with René Prêtre

Oxford University Press is pleased to welcome René Prêtre as one of the the new Editors-in-Chief of Multimedia Manual of Cardio-Thoracic Surgery (MMCTS). We got to know Dr. Prêtre during an interview and discovered how he came to specialise in cardio-thoracic surgery, how he sees this field in the future, and what he has in store for the Manual.

What encouraged you to pursue a career in the field of cardio-thoracic surgery?

The moment I stepped into a cardiac operating room, I discovered a field that… I just liked too much not to pursue it!

And, today after many years, it is still this incredible combination of understanding problems, knowing our opportunities to intervene, establishing a sound strategy and realizing the final goal with our hands that appeals to me.

What do you think are the challenges being faced in this field today?

There are constant challenges within such a dynamic specialty. I would focus on two current ones: 1) the creation of constructive collaboration between all the cardiac specialists, and 2) maintaining a critical mind in face of technological advancement whilst continuing to implement the true processes but resist gadgets.

René Prêtre, the new Editor-in-Chief of Multimedia Manual of Cardio-Thoracic Surgery. Author’s own photograph.

How do you see cardio-thoracic surgery developing in the future?

Adult cardiac surgery will be integrated into a heart team, where it will occupy a critical position. The very big operations, those that we have been performing until now, will become less frequent as the majority will be split up between different specialists. They will also be handled more quickly, before the development of grotesque or secondary lesions, due to the increased availability of imaging procedures.

What are you most looking forward to about being the Editor-in-Chief of MMCTS?

With Roberto, I hope to be able to generate a renewed enthusiasm in our Manual from everyone – from junior to senior surgeons. I also hope to establish the Manual as a recognized reference platform for the technical aspects of procedures. This is why the videos/illustrations will be peer-reviewed and edited: to insure the publication of reliable, verified and informative methods.

How do you see the Manual developing in the future?

It will work closely with our associated journals. The Manual will focus on technique, basic steps, rules of thumb, tricks etc. The EJCTS and ICVTS will present the results of these techniques and their critical analysis. We will encourage authors to produce an original article to these two journals that would ideally complement their “technical” contribution in the Manual.

What do you think readers will take away from the Manual?

The Manual will be an educating platform with a large library of good quality material. Junior surgeons will take away the basic steps of the usual operations, both from our videos and illustrations. Senior surgeons will find state of the art technical materials for their regular and challenging operations.

Featured image credit: “Surgery, Coronary Artery bypass” by skeeze. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay. 

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The exception should become the rule in the World Health Organization

After the West African Ebola epidemic of 2014, hardly anyone contests that the World Health Organization (WHO) made fatal mistakes during the crisis. It reacted too late and did too little to contain the outbreak before it got out of control. And it once again exposed its deeply entrenched dysfunctions that make it so difficult for the organization to live up to its role as the central standard setter, coordinator and crisis manager in global health: First, the WHO’s dramatic budgetary situation, with a near-total dependence on voluntary funding, had lead to tragic cuts especially of personnel and funds for emergency responses. And the quasi-autonomy and politicization of its regional offices slowed down the WHO’s response to Ebola and created confusion for external collaborators. Ebola brought these flaws to the spotlight, right in the midst of an ongoing reform process, which officially was launched in 2011.

Reforms to strengthen the WHO’s emergency branch in the wake of the Ebola fiasco are already underway. The learning process started with a set of initial recommendations made at the 68th World Health Assembly in May 2015, and has been continued with two further WHO-commissioned and several external evaluations that make further recommendations. The WHO Director-General Margaret Chan has already announced that she intends to implement the recommendations of the most recent first advisory report delivered by a panel chaired by David Nabarro. She and the WHO’s member states would also benefit from considering the very pertinent list of ten reform suggestions put forward by an external review panel convened by Harvard University and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM).

Rod of Asclepius on World by Mark Morgan Trinidad B., CC BY 2.0 via Flickr

It is still too early to foresee whether the reforms will be rigorously implemented and whether they will suffice to prepare for future crises. Yet, what becomes already clear from the new reform dynamic is that the “emergency branch” of the WHO will get exactly the medicine that would be needed for the organization as a whole — a medicine that can make the WHO internally more centralized and externally more accountable. I will mention three key lessons.

A first lesson is that a functional WHO needs reliable funding. In order not to repeat the protracted and cumbersome fund-raising efforts at the head of Ebola 2014, the Harvard-LSHTM panel suggests that a strengthened WHO emergency unit command a “protected budget” in the form of a “revolving fund” that is readily available when the organization needs it. In almost the same words, the Nabarro report asks for “predictable ‘steady-state finance’ as well as prompt access to a reliable contingency fund.”

A second lesson is that to act coherently, the WHO needs to centralize its governance and reporting lines. In that vein, the WHO’s first advisory report basically suggests that in times of emergency, crisis managers should be enabled to bypass the regional offices. It lays out in much detail the “centralized” procedures through which a strong emergency program should rapidly access funds, activate partners, recruit staff and work directly with countries — and thus be exempted from “normal” bureaucratic politics in an organization whose extent of regionalization is unique in the United Nations system.

A third lesson is that good global health governance needs transparency. Given the intense public scrutiny and politicization of global health crises, the “emergency WHO” has already begun to learn this lesson. When the WHO for the first time used its emergency powers during the 2009 swine flu outbreak, its failure to do so transparently backfired and was soon corrected. The practice of keeping secret the names of emergency advisors — many of whom later turned out to have ties with the companies that benefited from the swine flu crisis — was not repeated after the much-criticized H1N1 “pandemic” alerts. The Harvard-LSHTM report goes further in this direction. It demands that instead of the director-general, a transparent standing emergency committee should be entitled to declare global health emergencies, and obliged to publish the minutes of its deliberations. It should be financed “purely through assessed contributions to protect against undue donor influence.”

In brief, the WHO should be properly resourced, protected against lobbyism, and held publicly accountable in order to be a reliable crisis manager. Yet how shall it safeguard global public health when the acute crises are over? How shall it set reliable standards or advise governments on policy priorities and long-term concerns such as the rational use of medicines? Bureaucratic infighting, the dependence on the short-term goodwill of donors, and intransparent governance structures are as harmful for the “normal” business of the WHO as they are for emergency politics. In fact, the wish to make “special” arrangements for the emergency branch of the organization only underlines that the “normal functioning” of the WHO is in itself an emergency.

The unchecked and politicized functioning of the regional offices has been criticized for decades. And it is equally clear that the WHO’s budgetary situation is not sustainable, if not outright absurd. The main share of this budget must be raised through voluntary contributions, which are paid on top of a minuscule core budget funded by assessed contributions (making up about a fourth of the total budget). In the present situation, the WHO director-general must reinvent herself as a saleswoman. Her job is to persuade donors during so-called ‘‘Financing Dialogues” that they pay for the not-so-fashionable (or profitable) holes in the organization’s program budget.

And finally, the WHO continues to fear transparency. In the ongoing negotiations about new and better regulations for its collaboration with private actors, the WHO secretariat has once again proven allergic to strict conflict of interest regulations. As global health activists have recently revealed, the WHO’s secretariat is fearful of being too restrictive or transparent when it comes to staff secondments, advice, or financial support received from the private sector. In the present condition, the WHO simply cannot afford to lose the goodwill of its donors and donor states. Unfortunately, it is unlikely that the organization will heed the excellent advice given in the tenth and final section of the Harvard-LSHTM report, which calls for an all-out governance reform. It rather seems that Ebola 2014 will not become the critical juncture that makes these reforms possible, but a crisis that cements the bifurcation into an emergency WHO and a normal state of emergency in the WHO.

Headline image: Ebola Virus Particles by NIAID. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr

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Finding proportionality in surveillance laws

The United Kingdom Parliament is currently in the pre-legislative scrutiny phase of a new Investigatory Powers Bill, which aims to “consolidate existing legislation and ensure the powers in the Bill are fit for the digital age.” It is fair to say this Bill is controversial with strong views being expressed by both critics and supporters of the Bill. Against this backdrop it is important to cut through the rhetoric and get to the heart of the Bill and to examine what it will do and what it will mean in terms of the legal framework for British citizens, and indeed for those overseas.

The Investigatory Powers Bill

Much of the Bill’s activity is to formalise and restate pre-existing surveillance powers. One of the key criticisms of the extant powers of the security and law enforcement services is that the law lacks clarity. Indeed it was this lack of clarity which led the Investigatory Powers Tribunal to rule in the landmark case of Liberty v GCHQ that the regulations which covered GCHQ’s access to emails and phone records intercepted by the US National Security Agency breached Articles 8 and 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Following a number of strong critiques of the law including numerous legal challenges the Government received three reports into the current law: the report of the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament, ‘Privacy and Security: A modern and transparent legal framework‘; the report of the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation. ‘A Question of Trust‘; and the report of the Royal United Services Institute: ‘A Democratic Licence to Operate.’ All three reported deficiencies in the law’s transparency.

As a result the Bill restates much of the existing law in a way which should be more transparent and which, in theory, should allow for greater democratic and legal oversight of the powers of the security and law enforcement services. In essence the Bill is split into sections: interception, retention, equipment interference, and oversight, with each of the three substantive powers split again into targeted and bulk. What this means in practice is the authorisation of three broad types of activity (each of which have sub-types); the authorisation to intercept data between sender and receiver, the authorisation to retain data such as communications data and internet connection records for possible processing later and authorisation to interfere with (in colloquial terms ‘hack’) systems and devices. For each of these there is a split between targeted activity, which is required when dealing with communications which are sent and received by individuals who are inside the British Islands (domestic communications), and bulk activity, which is permissible where either the sender or receiver (or both) of the communications are located outside the British Islands.

Two of the more controversial aspects of the Bill are the oversight provisions and the introduction of a new form of retained data, so called ‘internet connection records.’

Image credit: Camera monitoring security by Peggy_Marco. Public domain via Pixabay.

Proportionality 

The retention of internet connection records are an entirely new power found in the Bill. It is an extension to the extant, but currently legally uncertain, data retention powers found in the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014 (DRIPA). This new power is thus controversial on two bases: (1) it fails to meet the proportionality principle on the basis it fails to comply with the EU Charter on Fundamental Rights; (2) even if the current law is proportionate, an extension of powers is almost certainly disproportionate. With regard to the first of these, the current law, as contained in DRIPA, is subject to an ongoing legal challenge brought by MPs David Davis and Tom Watson supported by Liberty. The case, Secretary of State for the Home Department v David Davis MP and others [2015] EWCA Civ 1185, has recently been referred by the Court of Appeal to the Court of Justice of the European Union where the court asks the CJEU to rule on whether the ground-breaking case of Digital Rights Ireland Ltd v Minister for Communications, Marine and Natural Resources & Others, the case which ruled that European data retention laws were incompatible with Articles 7 & 8 of the EU Charter, also binds national legislators in the making of domestic data retention laws.

Thus the current status of domestic data retention laws is unclear. However, while this case remains under review, the Bill seeks to extend the powers of the state from its current simple, yet still very invasive, powers to order the retention of all traffic data on our communications. This would include internet connections records, described in the guide to the Bill as “a record of the internet services a specific device has connected to, such as a website or instant messaging application.” This would be data such as which banking services we use, which rail company or airline we tend to favour and which may reveal much about us including gender, ethnicity, religious beliefs, medical conditions and much more. University of East Anglia law lecturer Paul Bernal has written upon this issue very eloquently in his blog. As he notes, despite the Home Office’s best attempts to paint these as akin to itemised phone records, they are much more invasive of personal privacy and they are also clearly likely to be more invasive than the mere retention of communications records, a practice ruled illegal under EU Law in Digital Rights Ireland, and which at domestic law is currently under review. It is difficult to see how this new provision could be seen to be proportionate.

A version of this article originally appeared on the Oxford University Press Online Resource Centre.

Featured image credit: Keyboard Macbook Pro Lighting by KeanuKeem. Public domain via Pixabay.

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Sources for Shakespeare’s biography

When opening a work of Shakespearean biography, it’s not unusual to find some sort of lament about a lack of data – albeit that it quickly becomes clear that this has not stood in the way of producing a substantial volume. However, rather than dwell on how this can still be done, perhaps we should re-examine what we mean when we say there is little to go on. Perhaps it is not so little after all, rather that, for some people, much of it is the wrong sort of information — that is, it doesn’t confirm the picture already in their mind’s eye, simply from reading Shakespeare’s plays and poetry, as to what sort of man he was. So, rather than taking too close a look at what we have, it is for them a safer option to express the traditional regret and dissatisfaction about how little has survived and then to dismiss the awkward bits as irrelevant (or too challenging) in their search for Shakespeare’s true identity.

First, though, are we any shorter of biographical data on Shakespeare than we can reasonably expect to be? Of course, it’s no use arguing that the material we have is plentiful. Archives from Shakespeare’s time did not survive because of their potential importance for posterity but because, generally speaking, there was some structure in place to improve their chances of survival; in particular the existence of an institution of some permanence in whose store rooms, often by accident rather than design, these archives could for centuries languish unnoticed and undisturbed. Thus, when looking at what has survived, mountains of data are still to found amongst the records of central government flanked by outliers arising out of the activities of other official agencies at regional, county, diocesan, town, parish, and manor level. In a different category are the records of the great landed families whose existence over centuries has led to the survival of respectable quantities of archive material, bearing in mind too the cross-over effect of members of such families frequently holding offices of state or important positions in the church. Records of other institutions of some permanence – schools, universities, Inns of Court – can also yield helpful data. But from this it follows that information on a particular individual, especially at a distance of 450 years, tends to be confined to occasions when he or she came into the orbit of these record-keeping agencies. So, when diving into such accumulations looking for information on Shakespeare, we will be largely dependent on the frequency with which he strayed in that direction.

Haunts of Shakespeare, no. 1 by Paul Braddon. Folger Digital Image Collection, Cornell University Library. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Shakespeare, however, attended a school whose records are lost, did not go to university or the Inns of Court; did not enter public service or become a government employee in any capacity; did not enter the households of the great or enjoy their patronage; hardly ever appeared in the civil courts; was never, as far as we know, prosecuted for a criminal offence or even a misdemeanour; and spent most of his life working for a theatrical company whose records are lost. Inevitably, then, biographical information is going be limited. Ironically, even the records which get us closest to the man – the several references to him in Richard Quiney’s correspondence (including the only surviving letter addressed to him) and evidence of Shakespeare’s attitude towards the Welcombe enclosures, to be found in Thomas Greene’s notes on the controversy in which he too had a personal interest – have only come down to us because, by fortunate accident, they became buried in the Stratford Corporation records. Quiney died in 1601 whilst serving as Stratford-upon-Avon’s bailiff, leaving a bundle of personal papers in the town’s official archives, and when Greene resigned as the Corporation’s steward in 1617, he didn’t clear his desk properly, leaving behind some personal material, including his Welcombe enclosure notes.

Bearing all this mind, then, perhaps Shakespeare’s biographers, rather than bemoaning the loss of archival data, should instead express some satisfaction that against the odds we still have quite a lot to go on. Of course, it doesn’t permit the writing of an intimate biography but then nor would this be a practical proposition for whole swathes of the population who lived outside what we might call the establishment and who never got into serious trouble with the authorities. So why not simply look at what has come down to us and draw what conclusions we can. For some – those who wish to know about his day-to-day life, his personal frustrations, his state of mind when he wrote his greatest plays, and his working relationship with his theatrical colleagues – this may have little appeal and they may instead seek to get closer to the writer through analysis of the words which he puts into his characters’ mouths, or less helpfully to indulge in flights of fancy. However, for those who prefer to stick to historical data, the surviving records do allow other themes to be profitably explored. For instance, they provide good evidence of the gradual improvement in Shakespeare’s financial and social position through careful management of his business affairs and the investment in real estate and other income-generating assets to provide longer term security for himself and his family; and also, later in his career, when his income from theatrical sources began to slacken off, how he took steps to ensure that this investment income would not be undermined. At the same time, though, by comparison with the financial position of other town gentry and by taking a realistic view of his daughters’ marriages and the later history of his family, we can see that by the time of his death Shakespeare had barely made it into the ranks of the minor gentry of a local market town. Such considerations are often ignored or glossed over as mundane or irrelevant when discussing the life of a literary genius but this was not necessarily how Shakespeare saw things.

We can’t be sure, of course, quite what lay behind his financial decision-making but the surviving data clearly show that he took a realistic attitude towards the need to provide security for himself and his family and allow us, as it would his contemporaries, to measure to what extent he succeeded simply by examining his ‘lifestyle’. Why dismiss this evidence as peripheral when in fact it provides the best-documented insight we have into one important aspect of his life? It doesn’t throw much light on the inner workings of Shakespeare’s creative mind, but it does at least remind us that he was a man of his time with worldly considerations to contend with in what to us would be a harsh and unforgiving world.

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Lying, belief, and paradox

The Liar paradox is often informally described in terms of someone uttering the sentence:

I am lying right now.

If we equate lying with merely uttering a falsehood, then this is (roughly speaking) equivalent to a somewhat more formal, more precise version of the paradox that arises by considering a sentence like:

This sentence is false.

If we accuse someone of lying, however, we don’t typically mean that someone merely told a falsehood. For example, if someone tells you that the Earth is hollow because they truly believe that to be the case, we wouldn’t typically call that person a liar. Instead, we would be more likely to accuse them merely of getting things wrong. In short, what seems important about lying is not the falsity of the utterance, but rather the intent to deceive.

Thus, we might adopt the following definition of lying (the subscript is to distinguish this understanding from a second understanding of lying I will introduce below):

S is lying1 when she utters P if and only if:

P is false.
S believes that P is false.
S intends the listener to believe that P is true.

Notice that condition (3) is required since there might be all sorts of reasons other than deception for uttering a claim that we believe is true. We might be reasoning hypothetically, or discussing a fiction, or reading a mistaken historical text aloud, or engaging in a multitude of other uses of language. But, for the remainder of this post, let’s restrict our attention to situations where the speaker is making an utterance in order to convince the audience that the utterance in question is true. In such cases, we can simplify our definition to:

S is lying1 when she utters P if and only if:

P is false.
S believes that P is false.

Given this somewhat more sophisticated account of lying, we can now ask the obvious question: is a straightforward utterance of the lying1 variant of the familiar Liar paradox sentence  paradoxical?:

L1:       I am lying1 right now.

First, note that L1 can’t be true: If L1 were true, then the speaker would have to be lying1 when uttering L1 But the speaker can only be lying1 when uttering L1 if L1 is false. So if L1 is true then L1 is false. Contradiction. So L1 can’t be true.

Thus, L1 must be false. If L1 is false, then the speaker must not be lying1 when uttering L1. The speaker is lying1 if and only if L1 is false and she believes that L1 is false. But L1 is false, so the speaker must not believe that L1 is false.

We arrive at the following interesting conclusion: If the speaker believes that L1 is false, then any utterance of L1 by the speaker is paradoxical – it reduces to a variant of more familiar versions of the Liar paradox. If, however, the speaker does not believe that L1 is false then L1 is not paradoxical but false. Notice that the non-paradoxicality of L1 does not require that the speaker get things wrong. She does not have to mistakenly believe that L1 is true. Instead, she might merely have no opinion about the truth-value of L1. Finally, if the speaker herself carries out the first piece of reasoning, and comes to believe that L1 is false (e.g. if the speaker is taken to be logically omniscient), then L1 is no longer false, but is instead a genuine paradox. So an assertion of “I am lying right now” – where lying is understood as asserting a falsehood that one believes is a falsehood – is not prima facie paradoxical (although it becomes paradoxical if we assume the utterer believes everything provable).

It is worth noting, however, that, we sometimes accuse someone of lying even if they say something true. For example, if someone truly believes that the Earth is hollow, but tells you that it is not in order to hide the existence of some (mistakenly believed-in) underground society from you, it seems right to say that the person has lied even though what they said is true. In short, lying might not require uttering a falsehood, but might intend be merely an utterance that is intended to deceive. Given this idea, we can consider another, somewhat simpler definition of lying:

S is lying2 when she utters P if and only if:

S believes that P is false.
S intends the listener to believe that P is true.

Condition (3) is required for the same reasons as before, but as before we can restrict our attention to situations where the speaker is making an utterance in order to convince the audience that the utterance in question is true, arriving at the following simplified account:

S is lying2 when she utters P if and only if:

S believes that P is false.

Again, the obvious question: is a straightforward utterance of the lying2 variant of the familiar Liar paradox sentence paradoxical?:

L2:       I am lying2 right now.

The answer is easy, since L2 is just equivalent, given our definition of “lying2”, to a familiar puzzle regarding self-reference and belief:

I believe that this sentence is false.

This sentence is not paradoxical regardless of the speaker’s beliefs: if the speaker believes that L2 is false, then L2 is true, and the speaker is lying2 (but not lying1), and if the speaker does not believe that L2 is false, then L2 is false, and hence the speaker is not lying2 (nor is she lying1). In short, any utterance of L2 is either a case where L2 is false, or a case where the speaker believes L2 is false, but not both.

Another way of putting all of this is as follows: when uttering L2, the speaker believes they are not lying2 (i.e. believes the negation of L2) if and only if they are in fact lying2. Hence, on the lying2 understanding, whether or not one is lying is not something one can always know, even though whether one is lying depends solely on what one believes. This is not quite a paradox, but is puzzling nonetheless.

Featured image credit: Smoke, by Carsten Schertzer. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

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Supernatural punishment: the common denominator

So here’s the question: Is religion evolutionarily advantageous? We can’t ever know for sure what life was like for our prehistoric ancestors, but I hypothesise that supernatural punishment was a very important promoter of cooperation and a way to reduce self-interest, which was vital to the evolution of human societies. As an Atheist, I want to know what the evidence is for this, so here are six pieces of evidence that point towards supernatural punishment as a common phenomenon of religion.

1. Everyday life

I think it’s quite common, even among Atheists, to find that when they do something wrong, they have a worry that their behaviour is observed or watched and known about and judged by someone or something. Of course an Atheist wouldn’t put that down to God or some supernatural agency, but they nevertheless have this feeling that their behaviour is known to something out there. Maybe you don’t feel it. I know I don’t always feel it, but I think it’s something you commonly find especially when the stakes are high. If something terrible has gone wrong, or something really good has gone wrong, people tend to attribute it to some greater force of nature.

2. Cross-cultural evidence

If you look across different societies and religions, the idea of supernatural punishment is very significant. We know all about it in our own culture in the West from the Old Testament in particular, where God was often angry and extremely vindictive against those who did not believe in him or do the things he asked. It’s still there in the New Testament in slightly different ways, but people are still worried about the consequences of their actions. They don’t want to do bad things because they believe there might be bad consequences. Hell is the big one, but it’s not only that. It’s the misfortunes that might happen in your own life. But it’s also the denial of rewards, so we might not fear Hell but we would all like to get to Heaven, and you might not want to do things that jeopardise the chances of getting there.

That is the West, but if you look at Islam or in Buddhism, you find that what you do in this life has serious consequences for you in the afterlife. The eastern religions, such as Buddhism and Hinduism, are particularly interesting because they don’t have a particular supernatural being who’s watching over us and punishing us, but the consequences of karma are just as severe. It’s a mechanical system: If you do good things, it builds up your positive karma, and if you do bad things it builds up your negative karma, and all this goes into your calculations about how you will be reincarnated in the next life. If you’re a very bad person, you might be reincarnated as an ant, and if you’re a very good person, then ultimately you will progress and be reincarnated in higher and higher forms. This supernatural punishment seems to be cross-culturally important, as it’s a feature of all the major world religions.

3. Historical evidence

We observe a fear of God and supernatural punishment in contemporary religions, but if you go back into Ancient times you find the same phenomenon as well. I looked particularly at the Roman and Greek religions, which on the face of it might seem like counter-examples. The Greek gods seem very capricious; they are often vindictive and take revenge and so on, but it doesn’t change the fact that people’s behaviours were in some way guided by the expected consequences that gods might bring on them, as well as the other people on Earth. So it seems that people’s behaviours, even in Ancient religions, were very commonly influenced by their fear of the gods as well. In Ancient Egypt, the afterlife was a significant concern both for the lowly and the elites, and of course they did all sorts of things to try and maximise their chance of getting into the afterlife.

By Wellcome Images. CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

4. Ethnographic evidence

World religions and historical religions are fascinating, but they are a very tiny subset of all religions that humanity has ever come up with. It seems that when you compare religions from across small-scale pre-industrial societies, you will again find that there is predominance in a belief of supernatural punishment, and a fear of gods or spirits or ancestors. This is not random, nor a quirk of a particular region or religion, but a systematic belief, which is very tightly associated with following social norms, including not breaking taboos, cooperating, and denying selfish behaviour. Time and again, you find it being important in these societies for promoting cooperative behaviour.

5. Laboratory experiments

We can look in the archives and the field itself, but we can also bring people into laboratories and prime them with religious concepts and see how that changes their behaviour. It turns out that people primed with religious concepts, particularly with concepts of supernatural punishment, will cooperate more. It’s intuitive, but it’s nice to have this evidence from the laboratory, and some of the new studies show that it is particularly negative sanctions that are priming this cooperative behaviour rather than the promise of rewards.

One experiment asked people prior to coming about their own beliefs in God. This didn’t presuppose a particular type of belief, but asked them for their own conception of God and whether it was more of a rewarding God or a mean and watchful God. Those who believed in a meaner God were much more prone to their own cooperative behaviour when they were primed with religious concepts. The title of the paper was “Mean Gods Make Nice People.”

I think the cognitive underpinnings of all this are really important. We can rationalise all this and we can understand it, but it turns out that we are very loathe to give up our primal beliefs about privacy. We are very sensitive to whether we are alone or not and if we’re not sure about this, the Swiss have helped us prove it by inventing toilets with glass walls. You go inside and can see out of it, feeling like you’re in the middle of the street and anyone can see you, but from the outside it’s completely dark. It turns out that people hated this, and couldn’t use them. There was no way they were going to do anything in there with cars whizzing past two feet in front of them and people walking past. The feeling of privacy is something absolutely wired into us and it’s very hard to remove.

6. Polls

When you ask people today about their beliefs, we are all told that secularism is a major phenomenon, which is creeping across the west, but even among self-declared Atheists you find some extraordinary beliefs. For example, beliefs in supernatural phenomena remain pretty high. It varies according to different types of belief, but significant portions of the public fear ghosts and believe that they can communicate with the dead. This is no surprise if we have these cognitive underpinnings that make us believe that there are supernatural agents out there that are observing our behaviour. However, it’s surprising to learn that these beliefs are alive and well even among secular populations. Of course, if you ask people that are religious, there remain very significant proportions of people who believe in the good old-fashioned concepts of Heaven, Hell, and Judgement Day. For several billion people throughout the world, the possibility of supernatural punishment is a real concern.

Image Credit: “The Great Day of His Wrath” by John Martin. Public Domain via WikiArt.

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