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The 2017 James Madison Award Lecture: the Ethics of Counting ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... POLITICS ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... The 2017 James Madison Award Lecture: The Ethics of Counting Deborah Stone, Brandeis University was already working on a book about counting before I got reading my draft book proposal, he wrote: “You’ve convinced me. the invitation to give the Madison Lecture, so the name- Numbers are representations of underlying power structures and sake could not have been better. After all, James Madison weapons in political fights. But,” he went on, “your enterprise is was the nation’s first quantitative political scientist. He is basically destructive. Can you move beyond destruction and give the one who came up with three-fifths as the correct num- us something constructive?” Iber for valuing slaves in the federal census.1 He is the one who Jens posed a series of questions: “Are numbers only weapons? used that mere fraction to persuade northern and southern states Can it make objective sense to count? Is there such a things as to ratify the Constitution. value-free counting? I realize that your answer is probably ‘no’ to Madison even thought numbers could define political interests. all these questions, but I think it is fair to ask you say so explicitly. In debates over the first census, he argued for counting the number I guess that counting is here to stay, so how best do we live with of people engaged in commerce, agriculture, and manufacturing. it? Can you help us get counting right?” How could legislators make policy to benefit the different parts of This lecture is my first attempt at answering Jens. I can’t the community without knowing “the relative proportion of each, promise to get counting right, but I will try to get it better. and the exact number of every division…?” If only legislators had Here’s my plan: more numbers at their disposal, Madison said, “they might rest Part 1. What does it mean to count? their arguments on facts, instead of assertions and conjectures.”2 Part 2. How do numbers get their meaning? Nothing could be more important to democracy than figuring Part 3. How do numbers get their authority? out what interests are and how best to represent them. So today Part 4. How can counting change hearts and minds? I want to talk about this mental leap from ideas about social real- Part 5. Are there some things we shouldn’t count? ity to measures of social reality, and back again to ideas. At the end of each section, I’ll think out loud about how Whenever I begin to talk about this subject, people say some- can we count better. Jens was right: I don’t think counting can thing like, “So you mean how to lie with statistics?” be value free, so my thoughts run to how we can make our val- Yes and No. Darrell Huff, author of the 1957 classic How to Lie ues explicit, and to how we choose the values we incorporate with Statistics, inspired a spate of books about numerical literacy.3 in our numbers. I’m not sure “ethics” is the right word for this The authors in this genre assume that numbers come into the topic, but by the time we’re done, I hope you’ll understand why world innocent. Unfortunately, wily people sometimes turn them I use it. to the dark side. Thus, Huff introduced his book as … PART 1: WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO COUNT? “. a sort of primer in ways to use statistics to deceive. It may seem “God made the integers and all else is the work of man.” altogether too much like a manual for swindlers. Perhaps I can justify -Karl Kronecker, German mathematician (1828–1891)5 it in the manner of the retired burglar whose published reminis- cences amounted to a graduate course in how to pick a lock and The German anthropologist Karl Menninger defines counting muffle a footfall: The crooks already know these tricks; honest men as “assigning number words to things.” What do we do when we must learn them in self defense.”4 actually count? he asks. I will argue, instead, that statistics aren’t born with honest “Before us lies a heap of peas which we wish to count . We arrange meanings that people later corrupt with deceptive packaging. them in a row, physically or mentally, touch the first one and say “one,” Numbers are figments of our imagination, fictions really, no then touch the second one and say “two,” … [and so on until] the last more true than poems or drawings. In this sense, all statistics one, and say “twenty two.” There are 22 peas in all. What have we actu- are lies. ally done? We have assigned a word to each individual pea.”6 *** This lecture grew from a friendly challenge by Jens Blom This description of counting makes a certain sense because when Hansen, my colleague at Aarhus University in Denmark. After we teach kids to count, the first thing we do is drill them on the number words in their language. Deborah Stone is a distinguished visiting professor in the Heller School for Social Policy It’s easy enough to count the way Menninger says if some and Management at Brandeis University and the recipient of the 2017 James Madison Award. grown-up has already told you that everything in the heap is a She may be reached at [email protected]. pea (figure 1). But if I told you that this is a photo of ballots in the doi:10.1017/S1049096517001767 © American Political Science Association, 2018 PS • January 2018 7 Politics: James Madison Award Lecture: The Ethics of Counting ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... I think Dr. Seuss meant this book as a message about celebrat- Figure 1 ing differences and having fun together. But for me,One Fish Two Peas in Pods Fish is also about the disintegration of counting. Dr. Seuss never asks, “What makes them all fish? What is fish-ness?” That’s the unanswered question and the paradox we can’t resolve. He ignores differences to count them all as fish at the same time as he celebrates differences to count them all as fish. Here is the existential dilemma of counting: How can we possibly count things if not one of them is like another? And here is where counting meets power. The only way to count is through intellectual coercion—to force things into categories by ignoring their differences and ultimately, their uniqueness. By the time we enter graduate school, we’ve lost sight of the intellectual coercion entailed in counting. So let me refresh your memory by taking you back to pre-school. If you look at charts for teaching pre-school kids how to count, you’ll notice that in these elementary charts, the objects in a group are absolutely uniform in size, shape, color, adornments, and even their orientation on the page. Kids don’t have to ignore any differences to count these objects, because there aren’t any. Photo by Bill Ebbesen, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pea#/media/File:Peas_in_ Once kids have mastered this much, we make it more compli- pods_-_Studio.jpg Creative Commons license: CC BY-SA 3.0 cated. We show them pictures of things that are very similar but have some variation. In the Sesame Street book, 1 2 3 Count with 2000 American presidential election, there’d be a question about Elmo, we get the simple version and a more sophisticated version “hanging chads” and whether those little runty things should be on the same page.8 For the number ‘6,’ the Cookie Monster is counted as votes. shown with six glasses of milk and six cookies (figure 2). For the So how do we make decisions about what goes in the “heap” number ‘9,’ the Count points to nine lightning bolts and nine bats of things to be counted in the first place? To find out, I went (figure 3). The milk glasses and lightening bolts are exactly the around the corner to my local bookstore and headed straight for same in size, color, shape and orientation on the page, but no two Dr. Seuss. For those of you who don’t know Dr. Seuss, his real name cookies are alike and no two bats are alike. Some cookies have is Theodore Seuss Geisel and he was a physician better known much more interesting frosting, with pink squiggles, chocolate for his fun, easy-to-read children’s books, full of kooky rhymes, dots or colored sprinkles, while others are more plain. The bats made-up words, zany drawings, and irreverence for grown-ups. are different colors, their wings are in different positions, some When I found One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish I was sure have their mouths open and some have them closed. And some I’d found the best learn-to-count book and that it would explain bats have teeth. how to count without a grown-up to get you started.7 Here’s how To a kid, the differences in cookie frosting and bat mouths it begins: might be worth considering. “But wait!” the kid thinks to him- self. “A grown-up lumped these different things together so I One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish. guess I’m supposed to consider them as the same.” Notice that Black fish, blue fish old fish, new fish. when kids learn to count, they’re not just learning number words This one has a little star. and symbols; they’re learning how adults see things. This one has a little car.
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