The first step to any business or governmental decision making largely involves establishment of causality. For example, in taking decisions regarding monetary policies, when we say ?in order to control inflation we must tighten money supply?, we implicitly say that monetary tightening in some direct or an indirect way causes prices to stabilise. Now, there are various ways through which causality may be established?empirical history, experience, logic, and intuition are things that a good consultant is armed with. I emphasise in this article something that has hardly ever received attention?the role of counterfactuals to establish causality?and as we shall see, it provides us a decent measure for a reality check.

For the purposes of this article, let?s look into the issue of fall in employment of Muslim workers in, say, Australia post 9/11?an important issue among labour theorists. I shall keep the focus of this article in mind and keep calculations simple. The question we?re trying to address is?did 9/11 create enough prejudice in the minds of employers? We?re clearly trying to establish event 9/11 as the cause and fall in Muslim employment as the effect. Dear reader! Let me offer you the game right here to start with – let?s just say that the total Muslim-employment fell from ten workers just before 9/11 (keeping calculations simple?remember?) to seven workers just after 9/11. That?ll be a 30% fall in employment. Pretty clearly, event 9/11 seems to be a primary cause of an immediate fall in Muslim employment (and I promise I will stick to these very numbers for the rest of the article). Convinced? If not, then you?re with me, but if yes, let me pose the following counterfactual?the 9/11 event may have led to a general fall in employment owing to direct forward and backward linkages with industries it encompassed (to offer an example of a linkage, suppose in a region, there is an accident in an ink-bottle manufacturing unit which is also a monopoly, and that recovery isn?t immediate?we?ll see that the demand for ink pens will decline and may cause a temporary unemployment among say manufacturers of ink-pen nibs). The word ?Centre? in World Trade Centre suggests linkages in manufacturing, agriculture and services across the globe and the case for our counterfactual is hence established. Now, if the non-Muslim employee population equalled 1,000 workers immediately before 9/11 and 700 workers immediately after, then I don?t need to argue any further?9/11 led to a general loss of employment (of about 30%) across all religions and castes and wasn?t particular to the Muslim population?the numbers don?t seem to suggest any incidence of prejudice. I rest my case ? but on second thoughts, let me offer you the game again.

As promised, I shall keep the initial numbers intact and change the last set of numbers?suppose the non-Muslim population fell from 1,000 workers to 900 workers. The case emerges again?only a 10% fall in non-Muslim employment compared with a 30% fall in Muslim employment post event 9/11. While 10% of the loss in employment out of the 30% can be attributed to the general loss of employment due to the various linkage effects, the remaining 20% should be attributed to prejudice borne out of event 9/11 ? isn?t it? The reason why I?ve led you to this point is to establish that even if prejudice is the cause for the fall in employment, one can?t still be sure if it has been borne out of event 9/11. Not convinced? How about the following counterfactual now? Muslim riots are common in Australia (hence my choice of region), a race riot may have occurred sometime just before 9/11 that must have triggered this prejudice. The question now becomes one of disentangling the effect of event 9/11 from that of these internal riots?and then see if event 9/11 still retains its significance. The key to do this is to identify changes in employment levels in areas within Australia where there have been such riots during then and in those areas that haven?t seen such riots. Suppose the former areas see a 30-35% decline in the Muslim population employed and the latter only witness a 20-25% decline (this is just to retain the average decline of 30%?like I said, I shall stick to the figures). It must be the case that the areas in Australia that didn?t experience such riots must have seen a general decline in Muslim employment accounting for 10% with the remaining 10-15% accounted for by event 9/11 thereby establishing both the causality and the significance. Needless to say, if both areas see declines hovering around 30%, then event 9/11 clearly hasn?t caused any prejudice.

At this stage, two final questions arise. First, did event 9/11 cause enough prejudice to have led to the internal riots at the first place??if event 9/11 caused the internal riots which in turn caused the fall in Muslim employment, then event 9/11 at least has an indirect effect. This is the reason why one must look at riots that may have preceded event 9/11 as I did. Second, couldn?t the riots of the cities have led to similar prejudices against Muslims in the non-riot areas rather than event 9/11??well, this is the reason I chose to select a subject region like Australia, where, race riots are so common that only an event of the magnitude of 9/11 could have brought an immediate change of consequence. You may very well note that these two questions hinge on the introduction of counterfactuals themselves.

The beauty of establishing counterfactuals is that one can go on thinking of them?and when one can?t think of more counterfactuals, one probably doesn?t need to, because by then the causality of interest may have been (or haven?t been) established way beyond reasonable doubt ? a reality check as I promised. Oh, and by the way, of all the formal studies I?ve looked into ? none suggests that event 9/11 aroused any form of employment-related prejudice against Muslims?just in case you were curious.

The author is a research scholar at the Indian Statistical Institute. This article is based on a part of the research idea the author recently delivered a talk on at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad