Numbers and political science
Louis Proyect <
lnp3@...>
2006-05-01 14:03:00 GMT
post-autistic economics review
Issue no. 37, 28 April 2006
Prying Open American Political 'Science'
Bruce Cumings and Kurt Jacobsen (University of Chicago, USA)
Numbers are seductive. We love what we are good at so it is hardly
surprising when a math wiz imagines that numbers contain the whole truth
and nothing but the truth. A mathematically talented teen recently told one
of us of an alleged encounter centuries ago of a famous French philosopher
with a Russian mathematician who proceeded to spout an algebraic equation
and to claim, because the equation made sense, that he had proven there was
a god. The philosopher, according to the story, was dumbstruck, which our
young friend interpreted as abject surrender to a superior mind. We replied
that the philosopher doubtless was flabbergasted that a bright fellow could
be so gullible as to believe that a perfectly enclosed and self-referential
system like mathematics necessarily had anything reliable to say about the
wider and wilder world around it.
Perhaps we were interpreting too, but the point stands. Run numbers through
a complicated enough set of procedures and they enchant especially
managerial mentalities who like to conjure a tidy abstract universe where
there's no need to use careful judgment based on extensive research and
hard-won experience about the way societies operate. Fill in the blank
spaces to a formula and, presto, you've solved the problem. Skip all the
steps in between and forget there was any processing as to what the numbers
mean. A great deal gets lost when numbers are used without humility or
reflection. Lousy policies are one result. Critics argue, for example, that
environmental costs cannot be expressed adequately in money terms. What
figure captures all the harm of polluted air, soil or water? The use of GDP
to calculate prosperity is misleading since it counts disasters positively
- the costs of clean-up raise GDP. Numbers may get you from here to the
Moon or Baghdad but won't tell you if the trip is worth it. Instead of
regarding numbers as a necessary evil we need to beware of, econometricians
typically treat them with adoration. Economists, laden with glittering faux
Nobel prizes, have led a strong trend toward quantification in all the
social science by deploying econometric models - models, moreover, that
tend to favour neoliberal market schemes. (After all, nothing commodifies
you like a number does.)
full: http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue37/CumingsJacobsen37.htm
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