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Archive for March 31st, 2011
India's Suicide Epidemic
Earlier this week, I wrote a post that questioned the accuracy of this statistic in an article by Michael Kugelman, a scholar in the Asia program at the Woodrow Wilson Center:
Yet, when food prices fall, India’s small farmers suffer. Already crippled by debt and encumbered by water shortages, 200,000 of them have committed suicide over the past 13 years.
That just struck me as an extraordinarily high number of suicides, but I didn’t do anything to back up my skepticism. Instead, I shot from the hip and wrote that
…inflated statistics (be they propagated in the media or in policy journals) don’t help inform the [food security] policy debate.
Kugelman graciously responded to me in an email:
I’m glad you brought the 200,000 Indian farmer suicides figure to my attention. I can imagine it would be a controversial figure, given how high a number it is. Let me just make a few comments about it.
First, that figure is an Indian government estimate — it is not a CNN figure (though the figure was cited in the CNN article). Specifically, as stated by the BBC ) and others, it comes from India’s National Crime Records Bureau , which catalogues suicides and “accidental deaths” in India every year . When I checked the site just now, I didn’t come across anything specifically on farmer suicides, though I may not have looked hard enough. The NCRB, so far as I know, is a reputable institution (it is part of the Home Affairs Ministry).
See this excellent article, published by IBN News (a reputable Indian media outlet), on the NCRB’s research methodology for the 200,000 figure (try not to get confused by the “lakh” measure — I often do!):
Frankly, I am fairly confident that the 200,000 is a credible figure. As you know, India has more than a billion people, of whom at least 250 million live on less than a dollar a day. Though agriculture remains one of the largest employment sectors in India, it has suffered from sharp decreases in investment in recent years with the explosion in services. Farmers in India have been caught up in fake loan scams, making them hugely indebted. And with the extent of India’s water shortages, farmers are not in a position to intensify their farming to try to boost their sales to help pay off their debts. Suicide is unfortunately a widespread phenomenon in India (and not just among farmers).
I think the 200,000 may even be a conservative figure (as the IBN article suggests), given that the government would probably be likely to underinflate the figure, as opposed to overstate it.
Nandini Sundar, professor of sociology, at the Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University, was asked to weigh in and agreed that India’s National Crime Bureau (NRCB)
is a “reliable base,” and “if anything will have under-reported” the number of suicides.
Other policy experts I queried also found the 200,000 figure “plausible.”
Belatedly, I did some reporting and researching, all which confirmed that many thousands of Indian farmers have taken their own lives since the late 1990s.
So I want to apologize to Michael Kugelman for not doing my homework before critiquing his article. In the future, I’ll avoid blogging in haste and also be sure to offer citable evidence (or an argument) when making critiques.
Understanding the Climate State of Mind
In 2009, a cover story in The New York Times magazine titled, “Why Isn’t the Brain Green?” opened this way:
Two days after Barack Obama was sworn in as president of the United States, the Pew Research Center released a poll ranking the issues that Americans said were the most important priorities for this year. At the top of the list were several concerns “” jobs and the economy “” related to the current recession. Farther down, well after terrorism, deficit reduction and en ergy (and even something the pollsters characterized as “moral decline”) was climate change. It was priority No. 20. That was last place.
Several days ago, Gallup released poll results ranking U.S public concern for nine environmental issues. Global warming came in last. I discussed the poll yesterday in this post, and a lively comment thread ensued.
So what’s going on here? Why isn’t global warming more worrisome to people? Jon Gertner, in his Times magazine piece two years ago, summarized the conventional explanations thought to be responsible:
Debates over why climate change isn’t higher on Americans’ list of priorities tend to center on the same culprits: the doubt-sowing remarks of climate-change skeptics, the poor communications skills of good scientists, the political system’s inability to address long-term challenges without a thunderous precipitating event, the tendency of science journalism to focus more on what is unknown (will oceans rise by two feet or by five?) than what is known and is durably frightening (the oceans are rising).
He could have written that paragraph today. But as his story lays out, there is a growing body of social science research that suggests the above reasons are not entirely sufficient (though they are surely contributing factors).
Earlier this month, I attended a conference on the state of this research and how it can be used to better communicate the climate change issue. The three-day symposium was called “Climate, Mind, and Behavior.” On the first day, one of the presenters, Jonathan Rowson, a UK scholar, set the stage with this:
Quite a few of us realize that [more] information isn’t working, that facts don’t do it. The question is, why exactly?”
One reason, Columbia University’s Elke Weber explained during her presentation (her work was also featured in that NYT magazine article), is that our brains are able to process only so many concerns at a given time:
If we have attentional limitations, if we have to be selective”¦it’s because we don’t have sufficient attention for everything.
Weber characterizes this as our “finite pool of worry.”
Thus, fluctuating public opinion on climate change, as measured in year-to-year polling surveys, should be understood in this context, Weber advised:
Sometimes we see these precipitous dips [in concern about climate change]. A lot of it has to do with “˜compared to what’ are we concerned about climate change.
For example, Weber attributed a big dip in 2001 to the September 11 attacks on New York’s World Trade Center:
We only have so much attention and worry to go around and compared to terrorism, climate change was low on the agenda.
Similarly, she added, a more recent dip in public concern occurred in 2008, amidst the global economic collapse.
Another reason why climate change doesn’t gain more traction, Weber said, is because of a lack of salience:
It doesn’t have the characteristics of making our hair stand up on end. For most of us, it’s distant in time and space.
Drew Westen, an Atlanta-based psychologist and political analyst who was beamed in via skype, reiterated during his talk that bombarding the public with more facts and data on climate change was a losing strategy. Instead, Westen argued that, “people don’t have strong emotions about climate change,” and that the best way to make the issue more deeply felt was through storytelling. Stories activate emotions, he said, noting:
We’re a storytelling species.
What’s needed, Westen said, are climate change narratives that
speak to ordinary citizens, particularly those that are on the fence.
Westen also emphasized the need for “multiple messages” that spoke to different demographics. Messages that succeed, he said, link climate change to values and concerns that people already have. So one message crafted around energy solutions might appeal to one group, while another message on pollution and health concerns might appeal to another.
This is similar to the framing strategy advocated by Matthew Nisbet and others.
I’ll be posting more dispatches from this symposium in the coming week. Meanwhile, those that are interested can head over to the Garrison Institute’s website, where a number of the talks are posted. Weber’s is just below.
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