my Review of "A Calculating People" by Patricia Cline Cohen.

[dawgman]

I think this book and some of her assertions have real meaning in todays heavily spun world. Numbers are constantly flung at us as proof of one idealogical thing or another and it is all subjective BS.

In Numbers We Trust


In her book, A Calculating People, Patricia Cline Cohen traces the history of modern numeracy from the adoption of Arabic numerals to the farce that was the 1840 census in Antebellum America. She follows this story from its painful first steps in thirteenth century Italy to the explosion of American numeracy in the 1830’s and 1840’s. She does this to display a uniquely American adaptation of an art that has been around for millennia; arithmetic. While she doesn’t necessarily prove that the development of the “statistick” and its subsequent functions, i.e. persuasion and quantification, are unique to America and to nowhere else, she does present a persuasive argument that the idea that developed of the “objectivity” and factuality of the “statistick” is absurd. She argues that this cornerstone of the American ethos is absurd. She argues, intentionally or not, that the average American’s nearly blind belief in the cold hard truth of these “objective” numbers is laughable.

Early in the book, Cohen traces numeracy from the rise of numerals themselves to the early seventeenth century England. She focuses on the rise of capitalism as one of the reasons numeracy began to flourish. She states that “the rise of capitalism…drew greater numbers of people into the world of monetary exchange, where some elementary calculation and bookkeeping were necessary skills.”(41) She then tells the reader, “navigation …introduced ordinary seamen to the wonders of mathematics,”(41) as well. In the first part of the book she also begins to tell us of some of the difficulties numeracy would have to overcome in its growth. The foremost of these reasons is the fact that “probably fewer that four hundred could be said to be mathematically minded.”(39) This is perhaps the most telling truth within her argument . If only four hundred men of Britain’s population were truly numerate then the rest could be said to possess a “self-limiting version of commercial arithmetic or else they avoided the subject altogether.”(39)This lack of much real mathematical knowledge within their society would pave the way for the later culture of number worship. Without a history of numeracy these people would easily slip into an unthinking trust in “authentic facts” or numbers.

As the book progresses into the second chapter, Cohen furthers the reader’s knowledge of the difficulties that numeracy overcame. Within the Virginia colony the investors that sent the settlers to the new land had only money in mind. Because of this, they had quantification in mind. The investors used quantification to try and turn a profit. The settlers themselves, however, when confronted with life in new land and new hardships, had little use for numbers. Mathematics did not seem that practical when starvation, disease and death confronted the colonists. The Massachusetts colonists came west as well. They wanted to “establish their own biblical commonwealth as a model for corrupt England to follow.”(49) The puritans did not teach numbers and saw no need to begin. Cohen goes on to tell us of “bunyanesque” numbers quantifying this new land of milk and honey. People flocked to the deathtrap that was Virginia in the early seventeenth century. As far back as this time period, people blindly followed these powerful and convincing “objective” numbers. The power of the supposedly numerate entranced the non-mathematical masses.

The third chapter focuses almost solely on the growing colonies of the Americas. This chapter focuses on three men with mathematical backgrounds who began to quantify everything. These men attempted to set order to the world through numbers. They attempted to lay a grid across the continent, to investigate the patterns of seasonal outbreaks of disease and patterns of weather. The main focus of the chapter is the outbreaks of smallpox in Boston in the 1820’s and the debate over the morals of inoculation. Typically, for a non-numerate society, the debate was not over whether or not inoculation was effective but whether it fit in with God’s plan. Eventually the “desire to live was decisive”(107) in the communities’ decision to use the new technique. Two steps towards numeracy came out of this; Dr. Boylston’s records of the statistics of inoculated patients and the census of Bostonians to gauge the scope of the epidemic. While these steps may seem small, they are crucial in America's arrival at the statistical mania that Cohen investigates later in the book.

In the fourth chapter she shows the steps that were taken within the young republic to increase numeracy in the general population. The decimal system of money made it easier for people to grasp bookkeeping and commercial skills. Uniformity of weights and measures aided in the simplification of mathematics. One could now work on arithmetic questions instead of endeavoring to memorize conversions of complicated weights and measures. Possibly the most important step was the simplification of mathmatical teaching techniques themselves. Efforts were made to help people to understand mathematics instead of merely memorizing. Arithmetic went from something that was only taught to wealthy boys of the merchant class who could afford to go to school into their adolescence to a subject suitable for seven year old children. This rudimentary education in the basic rules of arithmetic may have sparked, however, in the common man, a reverence for the numbers with which he had only the barest relationship. This may be the same sense of reverence that persists today and is illustrated in the fifth chapter.

The fifth and sixth chapters illustrate the lunacy involved in numeracy at this time. Statistics, true or not, misinterpreted or not became the lifeblood of American research. These often falsified statistics were the driving force behind the arguments for and against slavery, for temperance, and the perceived rise in prostitution, among other things. A largely inaccurate, but constitutionally mandated census sparked much debate. The surveys that these arguments were based on were biased. The questions were slanted, the possible answers were open to interpretation and the numbers themselves were often false. Yet these arguments were very persuasive simply because they had numbers to back them up. America was completely ensorcelled by the simplistic beauty of numbers they did not fully understand.

Cohen's argument about America's uniqueness in its craze for all things numerical is a good one but perhaps not followed through completely. Almost the only evidence she gives of the split between America and Europe is one travelling man's opinion. Also, in chapter two, she uses census' and surveys of Barbados and Jamaica as evidence of an increasing desire for empirical data and the trouble with gathering such information. The problem with this is that she never gives us a definition of America. Because of this, the reader must use his/her own definition. My personal definition of early America does not include Jamica or Barbados. My definition negates the validity of this evidence used in an argument about "the spread of numeracy in early America."(title)

Cohen does not definitively prove that America's infatuation with numeracy and numerical data is unique and distinctly American. Despite this, her book does give a good account of the growth of numeracy and the obstacles it overcomes. More than this, however, she demonstrates the reasons and possible origins of this countries obsession with statistics and number worship. She shows the roots of this ethos and the spread of it side by side with numeracy.