11/7/2020 Fat shaming politicians won’t end capitalism | openDemocracy

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ODR: OPINION

Fat shaming politicians won’t end capitalism

A recent scandal over a scientific article once again raises thorny issues
of who produces expert knowledge - and why.
Pavlo Shopin

3 August 2020

CC BC NC ND 2.0 Petri Damstén / Flickr. Some rights reserved

A
new academic paper claims to have identi ed a correlation between the
body-mass index of post-Soviet o cials and political corruption. Some
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people nd it amusing, yet this kind of research is not only misguided, but also
harmful.

Last month, an academic journal, Economics of Transition and Institutional

Change, published an article “Obesity of politicians and corruption in post‐Soviet
countries”. The article claims to identify a useful relationship between the body-
mass index of politicians in post-Soviet states and political corruption. It uses a
computer vision algorithm to identify the BMI of cabinet ministers in 15 post-
Soviet states from 2017, measuring 299 frontal face images and then relating the
results to conventional measures of corruption.

The paper, by Pavlo Blavatskyy, a faculty member of the Entrepreneurship and

Innovation Chair at the University of Montpellier, concludes that “physical
characteristics of politicians such as their body-mass index can be used as proxy
variables for political corruption when the latter are not available, for instance at
a very local level”.

I have seen many comments that criticise the study and highlight its unscienti c
nature. I have also seen people celebrate it: the paper seems to prove that
politicians are “literal fat cats”, and thus can be shamed for their obesity and
corruption. The knee-jerk reaction to this work is to dismiss it out of hand,
blaming its publication on a shoddy peer review process and unscrupulous
research practices. But it is worse.

The body-mass index and AI analysis of human faces would not be used to
identify political corruption in the west, but it is acceptable to use these
techniques elsewhere because it diverts our attention from the failure of
capitalist development policies in this region. (Indeed, the journal is a liated with
the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.) Despite the use of AI,
the study has more in common with physiognomy and the work of Italian
criminologist Cesare Lombroso, who believed that criminality could be identi ed
by physical traits, than modern science.

Just imagine how western bureaucrats, investors and bankers could use
algorithms to identify BMI of politicians in poor countries in order to decide
whether to give loans, support or funding to local communities or whether the
local authorities are too corrupt and should not be trusted. The bureaucrats do
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not need to leave their London or Brussels o ces, and instead can scan a few
photos of local politicians somewhere in Kyrgyzstan or Ukraine to decide on how
to allocate resources, using a proxy for political corruption approved by peer-
reviewed research. This gets even worse if we consider the results of the policies.

“
What is happening to western academia? Why are the poor blamed
for their poverty? Why is physiognomy back? How can scientists push
back against such harmful approaches? Why do some of them choose
to advance such prejudice?

Why did international policies of mass privatisation lead to increased mortality in

post-Soviet countries? According to liberal economists, the failures of
international development are not due to bad policies, but because of all that red
meat: post-Soviet authoritarians failed to cope with the challenges of early
capitalist transition.

This goes back to an old debate about the reasons why certain policies of
international development have led to social disintegration, higher mortality rates
and rampant corruption. The blame is laid on local cultures and authorities as
they are seen as corrupt. I agree that it is possible that o cials are corrupt,
authoritarian and often feudal “at a very local level” (to use the article’s words),
but measuring social realities through AI face recognition technology and the BMI
is nothing short of racist. This discrimination is not an accident. It is there by
design.

In 2009, David Stuckler, Lawrence King, and Martin McKee published a seminal
paper (“Mass privatisation and the post-communist mortality crisis: a cross-
national analysis”) in The Lancet medical journal. The nding was that “mass
privatisation programmes were associated with an increase in short-term adult
male mortality rates of 12.8% [...] with similar results for the alternative
privatisation indices from the European Bank for Reconstruction and

l hi h d h h li f i i i i d i i
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Development.” This paper showed that the policy of privatising industries in post-
Soviet countries led to higher mortality rates.

In 2017, a rigorous empirical study by Aytalina Azarova, Daria Irdam and others in
The Lancet indicated that “fast privatisation was strongly associated with higher
working-age male mortality rates both between 1992 and 1998.” The study
controlled for age, marital status, material deprivation history, smoking, drinking
and socioeconomic status. The policies of international development in post-
Soviet countries have led to devastating results in public health, rather than a
unique relationship between political corruption and obesity.

In response to this empirical research, there was backlash from liberal

economists saying that the failure of capitalist development in post-Soviet states
was due to local mentality - the latter being unable to come to terms with
capitalism and its demands. In e ect, these proselytisers of free markets and
privatisation said that capitalism does not work because of all the corrupt people
in post-Soviet countries. Of course, corruption is a problem, and culture has
played a role in what happened after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But the
focus on personal responsibility and political corruption does not fully explain
poverty, depopulation and social disintegration.

The forceful meddling of western state and academic missionaries in eastern

Europe’s “experiment” with liberal democracy makes a mockery of the whole
notion of the region’s fawning “imitation” of western ideals. There is a tradition of
blaming local cultures for the crass damage done by international development
policies around the globe. The paper in question is the pinnacle of this
modernising discourse, steeped in physiognomy and pseudo-science. But the
editors let it be published - and peer reviewers approved this fatphobic paper -
because it ts the narrative of blaming the failure of policies of international
development on local contexts.

At the same time, in July this year, the peer-reviewed Society journal published an
article “Poverty and Culture”, in which the author, Lawrence M. Mead, claimed
that “the ultimate solution to poverty is for the poor themselves to adopt the
more inner-driven individualist style.” Speaking about the American context, the
author argued that Blacks and Hispanics, who are not European, are
“unprepared” for the “individualist culture” in the country. Trisha Greenhalgh,
f f i h i i fO f d i d hi i
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professor of primary care at the University of Oxford, eviscerated this racist

screed on Twitter and started an open letter calling on the editor of the journal to
withdraw the paper. The article has since been retracted by the journal, which
stated it had been “published without proper editorial oversight”.

What is happening to western academia? Why are the poor blamed for their
poverty? Why is physiognomy - the art of judging character by facial
characteristics - back? How can scientists push back against such harmful
approaches? Why do some of them choose to advance such prejudice?

The cause of poverty could be the culture we inhabit – the culture of greed,
violence and oppression. These systemic problems entangle humanity on a
global scale and a ect both personal and collective interactions.

Western academia might continue to explain the failures of international

development as the world burns down around us due to rampant capitalist
exploitation and extraction. We might have insightful treatises on the failures of
local cultures to adapt to the glorious global progress of capitalism; but the point
of research is to change the world, not only to understand it.

In an essay for openDemocracy (“How does it feel to be studied? A Central Asian

perspective”), Syinat Sultanalieva addresses the problem of colonialism and
privilege in western scholarship, saying that “changing the status quo would
require a whole new political economy, which might prove di cult. Just as many
other of the currently urgent global issues, the question of coloniality in
knowledge production may not be in the interests of those with power to
address it - let alone change it.”

Post-Soviet states are dominated by international capital, authoritarian leaders

and oligarchs, who are well organised and work together. This cannot be resolved
without a rm grasp of the problem, and the paper by Blavatskyy is proof that
establishment economists distract the public and each other from the real
causes of corruption, poverty, depopulation and social disintegration. As a classic
saying goes: “It is di cult to get a man to understand something when his salary
depends on his not understanding it.” The problem is capitalism, not people’s
appearance.

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