Book. In public debate as in our daily social life, the figure has become proof. Quantifying, measuring, evaluating, noting, convinces us that we are acting “as it should be”. Both a statistician and a sociologist, Olivier Martin, director of the Center for Research on Social Ties (Paris), investigates Figure, a short and powerful book, on the origins of this conviction. It comes largely from the fact that we happily confuse numbers and science, whereas the latter largely preceded the former. The use of numbers has not always been that of proof of knowledge, and these other uses persist today.
Numbers have been used, since ancient times, to reach agreement on the nature, delimitation and extent of the objects that we perceive, that we manufacture, that we exchange, that we give up. We do not only know what we measure – as asserted by many authors who are heralds of the empire of numbers – but we only measure what we agree to know. There is no cipher without convention on what is to be ciphered. The definition of the unemployed precedes the unemployment figure; the definition of intelligence precedes the measurement of intelligence quotient, etc.
This is why, explains Olivier Martin, “Numbers are political objects”. The word “statistics” derives from the word “State”: the State needs to count men to raise armies, wealth to raise taxes, areas to delimit borders. The merchant needs to measure the time it takes to manufacture a product, the distance to deliver it, the currency that will pay for this time of work and transport, and the price he will have to sell it to ensure his gain.
From the sundial to the atomic clock
The example of the measurement of time, developed in an exciting way by the author, is enlightening. Initially linked to sunrise and sunset, this measurement was inherently different according to the seasons and the latitudes: the same hour does not have the same duration. It is only by convention, first on a national and then on a universal scale, that this measurement has been historically unified, by means of ever more sophisticated instruments – from the sundial to the atomic clock – to facilitate the exchange of goods, data, decisions. The figure, contrary to science, does not describe nature, but the representation that human societies agree to have of it.
In this yardstick, argues Olivier Martin, it is necessary to redo the figure the political object that it is in reality. Not the assertion of a proof, but a partial description of what is measured. It is not a question here of crying conspiracy and the “falseness” of the figures that we are told, but of debating new conventions, new objects, perhaps more relevant to face the challenges of the time. , and which should also be measured with all the necessary scientific accuracy.
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