Book Review: “Revisiting Targeting in Social Assistance: A New Look at Old Dilemmas”

The World Bank has just published its latest thriller, “Revisiting Targeting in Social Assistance: A New Look at Old Dilemmas”. The tone is set by the name. Using a pivotal colon as in “Frankenstein: or the Modern Prometheus”, “2001: A Space Odyssey” or “Chapterhouse: Dune”, the new book continues this tradition of futuristic science fiction, set in a dystopian fantasy world. And the use of the gerund in its short form, “The Revisiting” (as it is already becoming known to its cult followers), deliberately echoes the psychological horror genre of “The Shining”, “The Awakening”, “The Haunting” and “The Reckoning”. Weighing in as it does at 578 pages, the Bank’s new mythopoeia falls, in terms of its length at least, somewhere between JRR Tolkein’s “The Fellowship of the Ring” and JK Rowling’s “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”. Fortunately, like both of these precursor tomes, it is a riveting page-turner, with a myriad of mythical creatures, magical illusions and richly-imagined villains leaping out of each page.

Without wishing to spoil the plot for avid World Bank neophytes, the story revolves around an elite cadre of superior beings, who are plucked out of society, transported to the Capitol (echoes here of the “Hunger Games”), and subjected to some kind of collective brainwashing (the exact nature of which is never clearly explained). They are then trained in an arcane science to become “Technical Experts: Selecting Targets Of Social Transfers & Emergency Response” (TESTOSTER). Based on this acronym, the members of this privileged cabal are thenceforth known by the moniker of the “TESTOSTER-Ones”.

The Testoster-Ones are given extraordinary powers of life and death over their fellow beings: they literally choose which of the lesser humans survive and which do not. Over the years, ordinary folk become their playthings and the guinea-pigs of their cruel experimentation. After explaining the rituals of their induction, the rest of the book gradually reveals the evolution of the increasingly savage and sophisticated methods that the Testoster-Ones apply in their arbitrary selection of who should live and who should die.

Early approaches were relatively straightforward. The Testoster-Ones would simply select by geographical region: inhabitants of one area would be humoured with token support, whilst others would be abandoned to their fate. Later variants of this were to select on the basis of ethnicity, political allegiance or age: all members of a particular tribe, all supporters of a particular party, or all people within a certain demographic could be allocated, or deprived of, a particular favour.

Another early favourite was to encourage self-selection through slavery: all those who were prepared to work for the Testoster-Ones – breaking stones, digging pits, building temples, constructing roads and so on – were given the minimum wherewithal to eke out a living; all others fell by the wayside. Later refinements to this approach encouraged greater participation of women in such excessively physical tasks, or reduced the pittance paid to well below the bare minimum required for survival. The slavery approach, euphemistically referred to as “public works”, was also sometimes combined with another early favourite: that of a public lottery where the winners survived and the losers were consigned to the dogs. Or it was replaced by a particularly pitiless version of self-selection where potential beneficiaries were only offered food that was unacceptable to the vast majority of them, such as crushed insects or diced worms.

Later selection procedures drew their inspiration from the post-apocalyptic nation of Panem, where, for the 25^th Hunger Games, each district had to choose its own “tributes” (where a “tribute” is a nominee selected to fight to the death). Such “community-based” targeting offered the convenient illusion that it was not the Testoster-Ones making the selection, but rather mere mortals sending one another to their death. Problems encountered with this approach included the fact that the mortals often preferred not to make a selection at all, and that – if they did – they very often selected the weakest and most marginalised to be sacrificed.

The Testoster-Ones’ art of destiny-determination reached its apogee of refinement with the so-called “PMT” (mysteriously only ever referred to by its sinister initials – but perhaps denoting “Perfected Mechanism of the Testoster-Ones”?). Described in the book as “a more complex and opaque…inference-based assessment”, this generates a seemingly arbitrary selection of individuals, ostensibly based on predicted weights from a statistical model generated by computer, thereby bestowing a convincing veneer of scientific authenticity. The exact formulas used for the targeting are never revealed, but the reader is provided with a number of tantalising glimpses of the kind of variables that underpin their obscure equations: sex features prominently, whether the person owns an odd or even number of chickens, which element their roof is made of, the colour of their hair, the cooking fuel they use, their energy source… From this witches’ cauldron (euphemistically referred to in the book as a “social registry”) emerge the secret lists on which the Testoster-Ones’ subsequent selection of survivors is based.

The book concludes with a tantalising glimpse of the future, and offers hints that future random decision-making will be handed over to “big data” and “machine learning algorithms”, perhaps signifying an end to the Testoster-One era as we know it. As the book intimates: “Changes in technology and the availability of new data always excite hope that these will make targeting more accurate or easier”. Exciting stuff, indeed!

Although a compelling story, “Revisiting” suffers from one key short-coming. While the Testoster-Ones are roundly portrayed in all their magnificent finery and disdainful arrogance, the rest of the human race (their subjects, if you like) are depicted rather one-dimensionally. They do not come across as having individual characters or any degree of agency. They accept their destiny with a kind of resigned fatalism. Nor does the book go into much detail about the impact of the Testoster-Ones’ choices on these poor “huddled masses”: the fact that the system encourages them to deceive, imposes stigma on them, deprives them of dignity, creates perverse incentives, corrodes public morality, undermines social cohesion and sets one person against another to survive.

By the end, the reader rather wishes that the mass of mortals would come together, would rise up in popular protest against the Testoster-Ones, would rebel against their obvious abuses or would claim some basic human rights even in their capacity as subservient beings. One longs for the emergence of a Catniss, a Frodo or a Hermione to lead an insurrection against the callous cruelty of the cabal. There are occasional hints of this, but it doesn’t happen, even though it would have perhaps allowed a more balanced representation of the dichotomies between good and evil, rational and irrational, power and impotence. But, then again, perhaps this is a subject-matter that will be explored more fully in the next thrilling sequel: “The Revisiting Revisited”. We can only hope so!