The Cosmopolitan Expert: Dancing with Numbers and Narratives

The Power of Numbers

Deborah Stone captures some of the magic and ultimate power that we afford numbers and science. She (Stone, 2021, pp. 100=101) draws an insightful equation between the power that was assigned the Gods of Olympus in an early era and the power we now assign to number:

What is it about numbers that makes us put so much faith in them and trust them as oracles of truth? After all, when numbers speak, they summarize judgments that humans have already made about “what counts.”  Numbers acquire their power the same way the gods acquire theirs—humans invest them with virtues they want their rulers to have. Call it fairness, call it lack of favoritism, call it meritocracy, call it equal treatment. Call it wisdom. Or, as many people do now, call it objectivity. Our numbers, like our gods, promise to govern us well.

Where is the power bestowed by us on the Gods of number? It is bestowed in many sectors. Stone writes of the critical role played by numbers in such areas as the measurement of academic achievement used to determine acceptance into college (e.g. the SAT scores (Stone, p. 189-191), the assessment of human populations in the United States (the Census Bureau (Stone, pp. 1166-168) and perhaps most importantly (and most perniciously) the measurement of public attitude (e.g. the Gallop Polls) (Stone, pp. 145-152). These so-called “objective” measures contain many untested (and self-fulfilling) assumptions about the nature of intelligence and academic aptitude, the best ways in which to characterize and categorize race, ethnicity and even gender, and the best way in which to define political and social class realities.

Stone dwells on yet another way in which numbers hold great power. This concerns how employment and unemployment statistics are compiled and reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the United States. She notes that the unemployment number is fictious in two ways (2021, p.28):

To begin with, its authors have selected only a few kinds of-unemployment to include in their count. Counting unemployment is just a more complex version of how we teach children to count cookies: look for one or two features they all share and ignore the differences.

As she concludes throughout the book the two cultures are intertwined for the unemployment number (like many other numbers) “is a giant metaphor”.

Stone (2021, p. 28) goes on to further make the case for numbers (like narratives) being essentially nothing more (or less) than stories:

The unemployment number is fiction in another sense, too. It doesn’t measure what people actually do. It measures what people say they do when they answer survey questions. Some people are ashamed they don’t have a job and won’t admit it to an interviewer. Some people work off the books and won’t admit that either. The unemployment number captures people’s stories, not their actions. Even worse for accuracy, people don’t get to tell their stories in their own words.