The politics of quantification

Abstract

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.