One fair way to pay for past abuses

Germany will pay Namibia about €1.1bn (R18.4bn) in reparations for committing genocide during the colonial occupation of that country a century ago. The deal will create a 30-year programme of investment in infrastructure, health care and training in Namibia.

It wasn’t easy reaching the agreement. Negotiations began in 2015. Last year, Germany offered Namibia €10m, which was rejected.

The deal sets a precedent for the victims and descendants of historic abuses seeking reparations payments — calls for which have grown in response to the Black Lives Matter campaign — but there are many obstacles.

Alongside how to reach such agreements, a big question is how to agree on reparations that help heal society rather than cause further division. The discipline of behavioural science, which studies how identity and emotion relate to money, may have insights to the reparations issue.

Namibia’s rejection of Germany’s initial offer will come as no surprise to those familiar with the ultimatum game. In this experimental economics game, there are two players, G and N. G is arbitrarily given some money, say £10. N receives nothing. G must select how much, if any, of the cash to share with N. N can accept G’s offer or reject it. If N rejects, then neither G nor N receives anything. Both go home emptyhanded.

Economic theory offers a prediction: G offers N some tiny amount of wealth because N would be made materially better off by taking even a paltry sum. That prediction has been refuted time and again and across cultures. In reality, N typically rejects the offer if it is only a small proportion of the initial endowment. The common sense that explains this result is reflected in everyday language when we talk of an offer as being “insultingly low”.

A minimum criterion for reparations is that they avoid being insultingly low by adequately recognising the harm caused.

But there is also a balance to be struck in making sure reparations, which are inherently aimed at specific groups, don’t create more division by leaving out others who may have suffered harm in different ways.

The first step is to rigorously take account of the harms inflicted. That can be difficult. Even where the historic record is unambiguous and agreed upon, there is rarely the data available to accurately assess the harms people have suffered.

Some harms are so difficult to assess. The emotional distress experienced by descendants of victims is uncountable. In the absence of data-based estimates, there is greater scope for subjectivity to sway the debate and hinder attempts to arrive at acceptable compensation.

So far the problems outlined have been technical. How to measure harm on a money scale? Now the substantial problems begin. How to divide the compensation across groups? There is a human tendency to overestimate one’s own burden relative to those of others.

Ask two partners in a relationship what percentage of housework they do and, for most couples, the answers will exceed 100%. That violation of statistics occurs in a case where there is nothing at stake. Imagine how fraught when the stakes include large sums of money and issues of identity and victimhood. In this sense, any attempt to “compensate” for specific atrocities looks likely to provoke resentments among groups who have been differently harmed.

There are other approaches. This month France launches a “memories and truth” commission to shed light on its acts during the Algerian war. If reparations are part of the process, philosopher Leif Wenar advocates that they should serve the function of improving future relations rather than of compensating for past wrongs.

The climate crisis offers former colonial powers an opportunity to make a positive contribution. Global carbon emissions must be reduced but the big question remains: who has to reduce? Countries most developed got that way because they exploited the Earth’s resources and people. A way to proceed is for developed countries to make sacrifices and give less-developed countries their turn.