Quantifying the World: UN Ideas and Statistics. United Nations Intellectual History Project.

• Author: Bruschke, Jon
• Position: Book Review

Quantifying the World: UN Ideas and Statistics. United Nations Intellectual History Project. By Michael Ward. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004; pp. 1-256. $70.00; $29.95 paper.

Quantifying the World, by Michael Ward, is a history of United Nations statistics written by an insider as part of the United Nations Intellectual History Project Series. The interest value of this book for argumentation scholars is defined more by what it is not than by what it is. First and most prominently, this book is not about communication theory. It cites no communication theories. It does not try to advance, test, or evaluate communication theories. Given this distance from the broader penumbra of our field, it is not surprising that it has little or nothing to do with argumentation theory and scholarship. Any connection to communication theory is tangential at best.

A second thing the book is not is an apologetic treatise for the use of statistics, or an uncritical piece of cheerleading for the representation of the world in numeric terms. Those argumentation scholars of a more critical bent who will guess from the title that the author-a UN insider, after all, and a career economist at that-is marching in tune with a rationalistic project to reduce the richly complex world of life and rhetoric to a mathematical equation will be giving the work short shrift. If anything, Ward falls on the other extreme, chronicling the way that the data the UN has collected have been influenced by, and have influenced, politics. Data compilation frameworks "tend to be driven by particular ideologies and the institutional demands of decision makers," Ward concludes (p. 260).

To cite but one example, the emphasis on Gross National Product as a measure of economic progress is traced to a post-World War II, Cold War effort to promote U.S. corporate interests and counter Soviet-style socialistic challenges to that worldview. The GNP has blind spots, and does not explain whether the source of growth is from "increased incomes that accrue disproportionately to the already wealthy or if it arises from increased employment and wage earnings for the poor" (p. 94). The focus on national accounts "has tended to place increased power ... into the hands of central government.... This allows less scope for ordinary people and private enterprises to have a direct say in the decisions and allocations of resources that immediately affect them" (p. 93). Other examples abound: Ward...