On 8/6/06, Leigh Meyers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Like I said, the median means squat,. or, as raghu suggested, it coud be
"certainly greater than "squat".", or anywhere in between squat and not...
Weasel words and Nothing numbers. It's what makes America Illusorily great.
There is also a danger in over-correcting for one ideological
distortion. Two dangers, actually. One is throwing out the baby with
the bath water. In their proper context numbers can be informative and
thus potentially liberating (is not the "footprint" a number?). The
second danger is abandoning the discourse of numbers to those whose
magical attitude toward them is untempored by qualitative
considerations, such as the unKeynesian "Keynesian" orthodoxy...
Numbers have a popular fascination far beyond their actual content. To
put it bluntly there is a pythagorian cult at large. If it's not the
BLS, the daily horoscope will do. The conviction that numbers reveal
the music of the spheres derives from the sensible observation that
intervals can indeed be counted and ratios calculated and that given
bodies resonate with the vibrations of harmonic others. People tend to
forget that the links between the quantitative measurements and the
qualitative conclusions is often tenuous. $35,000 good -- but "$" is a
narrative, not a number. And that narrative may be a lie (I say it is
a lie).
"The flaw in our common view of science (and economic theory)," argued
Lewis Mumford, "is to see it as a 'higher order of reality' rather
than as only a 'higher order of abstraction.'"
--
Sandwichman
