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Trust in Numbers: the Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life
By Theodore M. Porter
Princeton University Press
310 pp.; $24.95, hardcover;
$16.95, paper
This morning's edition of the London Times reported on a recent speech made by the British chancellor of the exchequer, Kenneth Clarke. "Our recovery is now in its fourth year," he announced. "Output is nearly already 7 per cent higher than it was before the recession. Unemployment is down by over three quarters of a million. . . . Exports are up by 15 per cent in the last two years. Inflation has been below 4 per cent for three and a half years. That's the longest period of inflation at that level for almost half a century."1
Such statistical talk is now the lingua franca of the public square. Numbers exercise power in society, for they enjoy immense social kudos. Governments parade their accomplishments in terms of capital investment and economic growth; colleges and universities produce performance tables; psychologists measure human intelligence on a distribution curve; economists regale us with the retail price index and inflation levels; merchant bankers and international financiers monitor the balance of payments and exchange rates; environmental planners speak the language of cost-benefit analysis. And all are contested with opposing rates and ratios!
The ritual incantation of statistical claim and counterclaim suggests that number today is as magical as numerology was in medieval astrology. Nothing, it seems, can escape the rule of the statistical imperative. In the early days of the development of statistical analysis, for example, Sir Francis Galton--cousin of Darwin, eugenicist, African explorer, and pioneer of regression analysis--entertained the readers of Nature with his sure-shot optimal method of cutting a cake,2 conducted his own statistical inquiries into the efficacy of prayer,3 and also found it worth his while to prepare a map of the geographical distribution of female beauty in Britain.4 Or again, take the case of the tables produced by the Bureau de Statistique in nineteenth-century France. These tabulations annually revealed a small number of males in their twenties marrying septuagenarian women. These were rapidly seized upon by the statistical manipulators with the result that otherwise disparate individuals found themselves constituting a group that, in turn, became the locus of scholarly interrogation.
The range of questions to be asked of such a group--or of any other demographic data set now inhabiting the inner reaches of online digitized information archives--is well nigh limitless. Do they share ethnic or class characteristics? Have they common psycho-social profiles? Do they occupy similar niches in the political and economic order? Do they display any distinct pattern of geographical distribution or religious affiliation? Perhaps they enjoy similar dietary habits and culinary appetites, or like the same novelists, or take part in the same sporting activities. Indeed, the cluster may crystallize--say as "gerontophiles" or some other such neologism. In this way statistical manipulation displays its capacity to create social entities--and then to exert power over them.
How has this state of affairs come about? How is it that this push toward the objectification of knowledge has come to have such a grip on the modern world? Why do quantitative methods enjoy such prestige and power? These are the questions animating Theodore Porter's excursion into the world of numerical analysis in modern times. And these questions are all the more in need of resolution since he rejects the standard explanation that accounts for social and economic objectification as a response to its success in the sciences of nature.
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