{"id":172,"date":"2024-04-28T12:53:46","date_gmt":"2024-04-28T12:53:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost:8888\/sawberries\/2024\/04\/28\/william-deringer-explores-history-data-driven-arguments-0428\/"},"modified":"2024-04-28T12:53:46","modified_gmt":"2024-04-28T12:53:46","slug":"william-deringer-explores-history-data-driven-arguments-0428","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/localhost:8888\/sawberries\/2024\/04\/28\/william-deringer-explores-history-data-driven-arguments-0428\/","title":{"rendered":"Exploring the history of data-driven arguments in public life"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Political debates today may not always be exceptionally rational, but they are often infused with numbers. If people are discussing the economy or health care or climate change, sooner or later they will invoke statistics.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

It was not always thus. Our habit of using numbers to make political arguments has a history, and William Deringer is a leading historian of it. Indeed, in recent years Deringer, an associate professor in MIT\u2019s Program in Science, Technology, and Society (STS), has carved out a distinctive niche through his scholarship showing how quantitative reasoning has become part of public life.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

In his prize-winning 2018 book \u201cCalculated Values<\/a>\u201d (Harvard University Press), Deringer identified a time in British public life from the 1680s to the 1720s as a key moment when the practice of making numerical arguments took hold \u2014 a trend deeply connected with the rise of parliamentary power and political parties. Crucially, freedom of the press also expanded, allowing greater scope for politicians and the public to have frank discussions about the world as it was, backed by empirical evidence.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Deringer\u2019s second book project, in progress and under contract to Yale University Press, digs further into a concept from the first book \u2014 the idea of financial discounting. This is a calculation to estimate what money (or other things) in the future is worth today, to assign those future objects a \u201cpresent value.\u201d Some skilled mathematicians understood discounting in medieval times; its use expanded in the 1600s; today it is very common in finance and is the subject of debate in relation to climate change, as experts try to estimate ideal spending levels on climate matters.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cThe book is about how this particular technique came to have the power to weigh in on profound social questions,\u201d Deringer says. \u201cIt\u2019s basically about compound interest, and it\u2019s at the center of the most important global question we have to confront.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Numbers alone do not make a debate rational or informative; they can be false, misleading, used to entrench interests, and so on. Indeed, a key theme in Deringer\u2019s work is that when quantitiative reasoning gains more ground, the question is why, and to whose benefit. In this sense his work aligns with the long-running and always-relevant approach of the Institute\u2019s STS faculty, in thinking carefully about how technology and knowledge is applied to the world.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cThe broader culture more has become attuned to STS, whether it\u2019s conversations about AI or algorithmic fairness or climate change or energy, these are simultaneously technical and social issues,\u201d Deringer says. \u201cTeaching undergraduates, I\u2019ve found the awareness of that at MIT has only increased.\u201d For both his research and teaching, Deringer received tenure from MIT earlier this year.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Dig in, work outward<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Deringer has been focused on these topics since he was an undergraduate at Harvard University.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cI found myself becoming really interested in the history of economics, the history of practical mathematics, data, statistics, and how it came to be that so much of our world is organized quantitatively,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Deringer wrote a college thesis about how England measured the land it was seizing from Ireland in the 1600s, and then, after graduating, went to work in the finance sector, which gave him a further chance to think about the application of quantification to modern life.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cThat was not what I wanted to do forever, but for some of the conceptual questions I was interested in, the societal life of calculations, I found it to be a really interesting space,\u201d Deringer says.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

He returned to academia by pursuing his PhD in the history of science at Princeton University. There, in his first year of graduate school, in the archives, Deringer found 18th-century pamphlets about financial calculations concering the value of stock involved in the infamous episode of speculation known as the South Sea Bubble. That became part of his dissertation; skeptics of the South Sea Bubble were among the prominent early voices bringing data into public debates. It has also helped inform his second book.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

First, though, Deringer earned his doctorate from Princeton in 2012, then spent three years as a Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Columbia University. He joined the MIT faculty in 2015. At the Institute, he finished turning his dissertation into the \u201cCalculated Values\u201d book \u2014 which won the 2019 Oscar Kenshur Prize for the best book from the Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies at Indiana University, and was co-winner of the 2021 Joseph J. Spengler Prize for best book from the History of Economics Society.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cMy method as a scholar is to dig into the technical details, then work outward historically from them,\u201d Deringer says.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

A long historical chain<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Even as Deringer was writing his first book, the idea for the second one was taking root in his mind. Those South Sea Bubble pamphets he had found while at Princeton incorporated discounting, which was intermittently present in \u201cCalculated Values.\u201d Deringer was intrigued by how adept 18th-century figures were at discounting.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cSomething that I thought of as a very modern technique seemed to be really well-known by a lot of people in the 1720s,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

At the same time, a conversation with an academic colleague in philosophy made it clear to Deringer how different conclusions about discounting had become debated in climate change policy. He soon resolved to write the \u201cbiography of a calculation\u201d about financial discounting.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cI knew my next book had to be about this,\u201d Deringer says. \u201cI was very interested in the deep historical roots of discounting, and it has a lot of present urgency.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Deringer says the book will incorporate material about the financing of English cathedrals, the heavy use of discounting in the mining industry during the Industrial Revolution, a revival of discounting in 1960s policy circles, and climate change, among other things. In each case, he is carefully looking at the interests and historical dynamics behind the use of discounting.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cFor people who use discounting regularly, it\u2019s like gravity: It\u2019s very obvious that to be rational is to discount the future according to this formula,\u201d Deringer says. \u201cBut if you look at history, what is thought of as rational is part of a very long historical chain of people applying this calculation in various ways, and over time that\u2019s just how things are done. I\u2019m really interested in pulling apart that idea that this is a sort of timeless rational calculation, as opposed to a product of this interesting history.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Working in STS, Deringer notes, has helped encourage him to link together numerous historical time periods into one book about the numerous ways discounting has been used.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not sure that pursuing a book that stretches from the 17th century to the 21st century is something I would have done in other contexts,\u201d Deringer says. He is also quick to credit his colleagues in STS and in other programs for helping create the scholarly environment in which he is thriving.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cI came in with a really amazing cohort of other scholars in SHASS,\u201d Deringer notes, referring to the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. He cites others receiving tenure in the last year such as his STS colleague Robin Scheffler, historian Megan Black, and historian Caley Horan, with whom Deringer has taught graduate classes on the concept of risk in history. In all, Deringer says, the Institute has been an excellent place for him to pursue interdisciplinary work on technical thought in history.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cI work on very old things and very technical things,\u201d Deringer says. \u201cBut I\u2019ve found a wonderful welcoming at MIT from people in different fields who light up when they hear what I\u2019m interested in.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Political debates today may not always be exceptionally rational, but they are often infused with numbers. If people are discussing the economy or health care or climate change, sooner or later they will invoke statistics. It was not always thus. Our habit of using numbers to make political arguments has a history, and William Deringer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[130,80,266,131,265,141],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost:8888\/sawberries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost:8888\/sawberries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost:8888\/sawberries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost:8888\/sawberries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost:8888\/sawberries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=172"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/localhost:8888\/sawberries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost:8888\/sawberries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost:8888\/sawberries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost:8888\/sawberries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}