Quantitative Cultures in the Associational State

Peter Ore, Queens College, CUNY

Desrosierès' influential work (2001) describes four attitudes he thought prevailed among contemporary business statisticians in Europe. American engineers, chemists, and public health experts of the interwar period had their own distribution of attitudes, conceptually related to what Desrosierès identifies as an actuarial tradition of quantification. I infer these attitudes with a reanalysis of an important, cross-organizational study of early air pollution measurement devices called "dust counters." In my reanalysis, I examine the dust counter study's computations, tabulations, and interpretations of their measurements in forensic detail and relate them to both archival evidence and the wider technical discourse. Preliminary results suggest implications for the social study of numbers, the cultures of quantification in the American state, and for the measurement technologies and regulatory devices still used to govern human atmospheres.

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 Presented in Session 99. Interpreting the State