Related Papers
Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts: The Politics of Numbers in Crime and Conflict (Cornell University Press, 2010) (Contributor)
2010 •
Lara J . Nettelfield
At least 200,000-250,000 people died in the war in Bosnia. "There are three million child soldiers in Africa." "More than 650,000 civilians have been killed as a result of the U.S. occupation of Iraq." "Between 600,000 and 800,000 women are trafficked across borders every year." "Money laundering represents as much as 10 percent of global GDP." "Internet child p*rn is a $20 billion-a-year industry." These are big, attention-grabbing numbers, frequently used in policy debates and media reporting. Peter Andreas and Kelly M. Greenhill see only one problem: these numbers are probably false. Their continued use and abuse reflect a much larger and troubling pattern: policymakers and the media naively or deliberately accept highly politicized and questionable statistical claims about activities that are extremely difficult to measure. As a result, we too often become trapped by these mythical numbers, with perverse and counterproductive consequences. This problem exists in myriad policy realms. But it is particularly pronounced in statistics related to the politically charged realms of global crime and conflict-numbers of people killed in massacres and during genocides, the size of refugee flows, the magnitude of the illicit global trade in drugs and human beings, and so on. In Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts, political scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, and policy analysts critically examine the murky origins of some of these statistics and trace their remarkable proliferation. They also assess the standard metrics used to evaluate policy effectiveness in combating problems such as terrorist financing, sex trafficking, and the drug trade.
How Numbers Rule the World: The Use and Abuse of Statistics in Global Politics
Lorenzo Fioramonti
Numbers dominate global politics and, as a result, our everyday lives. Credit ratings steer financial markets and can make or break the future of entire nations. GDP drives our economies. Stock market indices flood our media and national debates. Statistical calculations define how we deal with climate change, poverty and sustainability. But what is behind these numbers? In How Numbers Rule the World, Lorenzo Fioramonti reveals the hidden agendas underpinning the use of statistics and those who control them. Most worryingly, he shows how numbers have been used as a means to reinforce the grip of markets on our social and political life, curtailing public participation and rational debate. An innovative and timely exposé of the politics, power and contestation of numbers
The New Politics of Numbers
The New Politics of Numbers: An Introduction
Robert Salais
This chapter sets out what is “new” in the politics of numbers and this volume’s approach to their study. Rather than asking what quantification is, this volume is interested in describing and analysing what quantification does, tracking and unpacking various quantification practices and their manifold consequences in different domains. The book revisits the power of numbers, and examines changing relations between numbers and democracy. It engages, for the first time, Foucault inspired studies of quantification and the economics of convention in a critical dialogue. In so doing, the volume seeks to account more systematically for the plurality of the possible ways in which numbers can come to govern, highlighting not only disciplinary effects but also the collective mobilization capacities quantification can offer.
Limits of the Numerical: The Abuses and Uses of Quantification
Are Numbers Really as Bad as They Seem? A Political-Philosophy Perspective (pre-proof version of a chapter from Limits of the Numerical: The Abuses and Uses of Quantification, ed. by Anna Alexandrova, Stephen John and Chris Newfield for University of Chicago Press)
2022 •
Gabriele Badano
This chapter aims to make analytical political philosophy part of existing discussions about the role of numbers in the workings of political institutions - discussions that already cut across many other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. To do that, it will first explore the prominent ‘capability approach’ to justice, which is characterised by scepticism towards excessive precision in law- and policy-making. Given the close link between precision and quantification, the loudest voice from political philosophy will therefore turn out to be one of warning against the use of numbers in political decision-making. However, the chapter will also discuss powerful objections to the capability approach that, building on the work of John Rawls, stress the importance of public justification and, in turn, simplifying devices in political decision-making. Those objections will be used to demonstrate that quantification can play functions that are very important from a normative perspective. To further support its claim that under certain circ*mstances, numerical tools might well be the best way of making political decisions, the chapter will use as a case study the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, an administrative body in charge of appraising health technology for use in the British National Health Service.
Journal of Humanistic Mathematics
Some Contributions to the Sociology of Numbers
Statistical Journal of the IAOS
Governing by the numbers
2021 •
Walter Josef Radermacher
Baele S., T.Balzacq, and P.Bourbeau, "Numbers in Global Security Governance", European Journal of International Security, 2018, 3(1): 22-44.
Stephane Baele, Philippe Bourbeau
The use of numbers has been remarkably effective at pressing global claims. Whilst research has documented the historical processes through which numbers gained such prominence, and has examined the political and ethical consequences of this omnipresence, very little is known regarding the specific ways in which numbers create the outcomes that sustain governance. This article proposes to close that gap. Building on the literature that acknowledges that numbers not only describe things but also have profound impacts on things themselves, this paper offers an integrated account of the working dynamics of numbers in the governance of security. To do so, the article identifies three distinct but connected vectors of power through which numbers shape security governance: persuasion, (de)politicization, and standardization. These insights are exemplified through the prism of different empirical examples, the variety of which aims to display the advantages of the approach we propose.
Accounting Organizations and Society - ACCOUNT ORGAN SOC
The politics of quantification * * I would like to thank Peter Miller for encouraging me to write this essay and offering useful advice on revising it. I would also like to thank Ted Porter for his useful correction of some of my interpretation of the book. Of course, neither is responsible for t...
1998 •
Neil Fligstein
Ted Porter’s Trust in Numbers is an ambitious attempt to show how quantification in the social sciences was a response to problems of trust generated by conflicts between social scientists, politicians, managers, owners, and bureaucrats in the U.S., Britain, and France. Porter’s argument is that quantification is one way to attain trust within a profession or in the political sphere. His case studies show that less organized social scientists were forced by external constituencies to quantify, while more organized groups were able to assert their expertise and use connections to important political and economic elites to resist quantification. While Porter’s book opens new terrain, I propose that one way to reinterpret the book is to have a more explicit view of how the relations between political and economic elites produce different problems of trust and different forms of control.
How the Mass Media Use Numbers to Tell a Story
Jerome Himmelstein
Mrs. Columbo's antipolitics machine: Quantitative data in responsible finance
Elizabeth Ferry
Metrics and other forms of quantification as technologies for rendering knowledge as measurable, usually quantitative "data," in simplified, legible, and portable ways, have become increasingly central within discussions of the economy, and these quantitative tools have equally become the subject of anthropological discussion and critique. The motivations behind and effects of numbers in the field of "responsible finance," already a space where the "ethical claims" of the economy are made explicit, have themselves become the center of ethical discussion, both within the field of responsible finance and among those anthropologists studying that field. The authors of this article (one an academic, one a practitioner in impact investing, and one a hybrid academic-practitioner in climate finance) respond to the argument that we suggest is implicitly or explicitly present in most of the work around quantification and metrics, namely, that quantification acts as a kind of "antipolitics machine," rendering political problems as technical ones and simplifying complex realities.
