The New Politics of Numbers : Utopia, Evidence and Democracy

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.

1.The New Politics of Numbers: An Introduction.- 2.Creating a Socialist Society and Quantification in the USSR.- 3.The People''s Algorithms: Social Credits and the Rise of China''s Big (Br)other.- 4.Accounting for Who We Are and What We Could Be: Inventing Taxonomies of the Self in an Age of Social Disquiet.- 5.Quantifying Inequality: From Contentious Politics to the Dream of an Indifferent Power.- 6.Homo Statisticus: A History of France''s General Public Statistical Infrastructure on Population since 1950.- 7.A New Calculable World in the Making: Governing through Transnational Certification Standards.- 8.Do Performance Indicators Improve the Effectiveness of Development Aid?.- 9.Archaeology of a Quantification Device: Quantification, Policies and Politics in French Higher Education.- 10.Quantification = Economization? Numbers, Ratings and Rankings in the Prison Service of England and Wales.- 11.The Shifting Legitimacies of Price Measurements: Official Statistics and the Quantification of Pwofitasyon in the 2009 Social Struggle in Guadeloupe.- 12."La donnée n''est pas un donné": Statistics, Quantification and Democratic Choice.- 13.Free from Numbers? The Politics of Qualitative Sociology in the U.S. since 1945.