On Projection, Capital and Racialized Risk

• In Event: Modeling Health Futures: Practices of Assuming, Anticipating, and Forecasting - III

Abstract

What are the stakes of using these models not only to predict disease dynamics and speculate about effective interventions, but also to monetize them for the purposes of generating profit for private investors and delivering financial assistance to cash-strapped governments in the midst of an epidemic? When epidemic models are used to define the parameters of pandemic bond payouts, risk and uncertainty have been harnessed to generate profits and move capital into cash-strapped health markets (Erikson 2015; Sridar and Stein 2015). Formally, proprietary models underwrite the pandemic emergency financing facility (PEF), a financing mechanism developed to rapidly and efficiently fund responses to a select number of epidemics in low-income countries. This financing framework, devised by the World Bank under physician-anthropologist Jim Yong Kim’s leadership, raises deep ethical questions about the commodification and financialization of suffering (Erikson forthcoming). Via a close reading of the instruments’ documentation (“the terms”), investigative reporting on its deployment in an Ebola outbreak, and ethnographic interviews with modelers, I recast these ethical questions not through a political economic critique of financialization per se (Erikson 2015; Sridar and Stein 2016) or of theories of biovalue (Waldby 2002; Sunder Rajan 2006), but rather of racial capital and risk ideologies embedded in relationships among international financial institutions, corporatized mathematical expertise, insurers and health organizations (Kish and Leroy 2015; Melamed 2015).

Author

• Adia Benton