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NUMBERS
Volume 68  No. 2 (Summer 2001)
Arien Mack, Editor

Table of Contents   Notes on Contributors     Ordering information

Editor's Introduction

    This issue on “Numbers” covers ground that has been explored many times before, but it is a process that probably cannot be exhausted. For a journal that lives in a social science faculty, the decision to organize this issue seemed long overdue, and its appropriateness was recently confirmed by the welcomed arrival of our new dean, Kenneth Prewitt, who until early January of this year was the director of the United States Census Bureau. The decision to proceed with this issue occurred in the midst of the Y2K hysteria, which, if it did anything, focused the attention of the nation on what havoc a change in but a single number
might create. We escaped from that potentially crippling and wildly hyped disaster without a scratch, but were more recently reminded of the power of numbers in the congressional fight over the proper way to conduct the census.
    However, even if we had not had these well-publicized warnings about the power of numbers, the many questions surrounding the use of numbers and what they represent would have remained important. This issue was designed to look at these questions about the roles numbers play in society and in our lives, both by looking back at how some of these questions arose and how they have been and are being answered.       Arien Mack

Recommended Reading

 Politics and Science: How their Interplay Results in Public Policy
Vol. 73 No. 3 (Fall 2006)

Errors: Consequences of Big Mistakes in the Natural and Social Sciences
Vol. 72 No. 1 (Spring 2005)

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Notes on Contributors
(at time of publication)

Margo Anderson is Professor of History and Urban Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. She is the editor of the Encyclopedia of the U.S. Census (2000), coauthor (with Stephen Fienberg) of Who Counts? The Politics of Census-Taking in Contemporary America (1999), and author of The American Census: A Social History (1988).

Claudia Baracchi is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the New School University’s Graduate Faculty. Her most recently published paper is “Meditations on the Philosophy of History” in Research in Phenomenology (2001), and her book, Of Myth, Life, and War in Plato’s Republic, is forthcoming in December 2001.

Marcel Boumans is Professor of Economics at the University of Amsterdam. His work on methodology, models, measurement, and mathematics includes the article “Built-in Justification” in Models as Mediators (Morgan and Morrison, eds., 1999). His paper, “Fisher’s Instrumental Approach to Index Numbers,” is forthcoming in History of Political Economy (2001).

Martin Bulmer is Professor of Sociology and Director of the ESRC Social Survey Question Bank at the University
of Surrey. He is coeditor of Racism (1999) and Citizenship Today: The Contemporary Relevance of T. H. Marshall (1996), and the author of The Chicago School of Sociology: Institutionalisation, Diversity, and the Rise of Sociological Research (1984).

Alain Desrosières is a member of INSEE, the French national statistical office. He is the author of The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning (1998) and is currently engaged in research about the sociology of statistics, especially their construction and their uses.

Otniel E. Dror, M.D. and Ph.D., is Lecturer and Head of the History of Medicine Section in the Medical Faculty of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. This article is part of a larger book project tentatively titled The Science of Passion: Modernity and the Study of Emotions. Recent publications have appeared in Isis (1999) and Configurations (1999).

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