Helen Joyce
speaker
181 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2012
last heard Jan 2015
Helen Joyce’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
These are not things that people have good figures on.
So they made some, shall we say, heroic assumptions based on very tiny surveys and so on.
And then the most shocking thing that they did is there are some countries for which there are literally no estimates whatsoever, not one single figure you can use.
So they go beyond using small figures, out-of-date figures, incomparable figures, and they actually used figures for some countries for other countries on the grounds that they were vaguely similar.
There is an estimate of the amount of slavery that's happening today in the United Kingdom.
So they used that estimate for Ireland and Iceland on the grounds that they were also island nations.
And then they didn't have figures for some parts of Europe.
So they used figures from the United States.
I mean, I guess on the grounds they were, you know, modern Western nations with similar GDPs and land borders and so on.
If you were trying to get some ballpark figure for the total number of slaves in the world today, this is just about something that you could imagine doing to come to a headline figure.
I think already it's a bit shoddy, but anyway.
But if you're then going to rank countries...
And then the worst thing they did was they actually named and shamed the bottom countries.
And when you think how poor the data were, that's really totally unfair.
I do think there's a place for rankings and for categorising countries in, say, four or five categories, because I think it's really clear and it's hard for politicians to wriggle out of a clear-cut judgement.
It's just that if you're going to do that, you have to be doing it with the most incredible integrity and you also have to be completely transparent about what you're doing.
I'm Helen Joyce, the international editor of The Economist, and my number of the year, it's actually a ratio, it's 7 to 1.
It means two things to me as a former Brazil correspondent for The Economist, and both of them sad.
One of them is the score that Germany got against Brazil in July in the semi-final of the World Cup.
Germany got 7, Brazil went out on a humiliating 1.
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