The New Politics of Numbers : Utopia, Evidence and Democracy

• Superior document: Executive Politics and Governance
• Author: Mennicken, Andrea.
• TeilnehmendeR: Salais, Robert.
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Language: English
• Series: Executive Politics and Governance
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (514 p.)
• Notes: Description based upon print version of record.

This open access book offers unique insight into how and where ideas and instruments of quantification have been adopted, and how they have come to matter. Rather than asking what quantification is, New Politics of Numbers explores what quantification does, its manifold consequences in multiple domains. It scrutinizes the power of numbers in terms of the changing relations between numbers and democracy, the politics of evidence, and dreams and schemes of bettering society. The book engages Foucault inspired studies of quantification and the economics of convention in a critical dialogue. In so doing, it provides a rich account of the plurality of possible ways in which numbers have come to govern, highlighting not only their disciplinary effects, but also the collective mobilization capacities quantification can offer. This book will be invaluable reading for academics and graduate students in a wide variety of disciplines, as well as policymakers interested in the opportunities and pitfalls of governance by numbers.

Table of Contents

Intro -- Foreword: What Numbers Do -- Acknowledgments -- Contents -- Notes on Contributors -- List of Figures -- List of Tables -- 1 The New Politics of Numbers: An Introduction -- Quantification as Utopia -- The Politics of Evidence -- Voicing for Democracy -- Quantification: Where the Economics of Convention Approach Meets Foucault -- References -- Part I Quantification as Utopia -- 2 Creating a Socialist Society and Quantification in the USSR -- Inventing a New Form of Statistics for a New Model of Society -- A New State Statistics Administration

A Complicated Demarcation Between Accounting and Statistics -- A Task of Theoretical Deconstruction -- Debates and Tensions Surrounding Statistical Theory -- Tension Surrounding the Mean and the Law of Large Numbers -- Tensions Around the Shift to the Random Model -- What Form of Statistics for Constructing a New Order? -- The Relationship Between Statistics and Accounting -- Categorization of the Population and Censuses -- Confidence in the Data and the Status of the Statistician -- What Statistical Tools for a New Order? -- Conclusion -- References

3 The People's Algorithms: Social Credits and the Rise of China's Big (Br)other -- The Earlier Chinese Dream -- Personal Dossiers -- Social Credit -- The Total Information System -- The Future Now -- Bigger Than Big Other -- References -- 4 Accounting for Who We Are and Could Be: Inventing Taxonomies of the Self in an Age of Uncertainty -- Corporeal Accounting Within Immaterial Capitalism -- Calculation and the Living Body -- The Quantified Self -- Well-Being, Performance and Emotions as Core Issues of Leibschreiben (Writing the Body) -- The Emerging Taxonomies of the Self

Inventing Representational Forms -- Moral Conflicts in Quantifying the Self -- Quantifying Performance: Alternative Measures, Rational Planning and the Deficiency of Corporeal Sensations -- Conclusions -- References -- 5 Quantifying Inequality: From Contentious Politics to the Dream of an Indifferent Power -- Words: The Semantics of Poverty and the Syntax of the Threshold -- Shifting Words -- Moralization -- The Threshold -- Visibility and Obfuscation -- Spatial Choreographies: From Inequality to Distance -- Numbers: Measuring Inequality -- Conclusions: The Dream of an Indifferent Power

References -- Part II The Politics of Evidence -- 6 Homo Statisticus: A History of France's General Public Statistical Infrastructure on Population Since 1950 -- The Representative Household Survey -- The Biographical Investigation -- The Matched Panels -- Homo Statisticus: Three Types of Being Constructed by the Statistical Infrastructure -- Conclusion -- References -- 7 A New Calculable Global World in the Making: Governing Through Transnational Certification Standards -- Introduction: The Evolving Politics of Calculable Worlds

From State Statistics to Government Through Standards: A Research Programme on the Politics of Conventional Forms and Engagements