An uneven statistical topography: the political economy of household budget surveys in late colonial Ghana, 1951–1957

Serra, Gerardo

doi:10.1080/02255189.2014.873023

Cited by 18 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 18 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Clear examples of the thinning of description exist all across the scholarly literature examining "inequality knowledge." These include the calculation of universal caloric requirements (Bonnecase 2018); or the standardization of the "household" as a unit of measurement in Ghana, in ways that overlook the structure of polygamous families and rural/urban remittances (Serra 2014); or the sidestepping of the messy and contentious politics of caste in India's postcolonial census (Desai 2010); the processes of selecting, standardizing, and deploying social metrics obscures the particularities of social life: of meals eaten with friends, branching kinship networks, and the deprivations of social caste, and class. In the process, we lose not only rich detail, but also intersectional evidence, what helps explain links between more narrow measures (income or wealth, for instance) and other areas of social exclusions, including class, race, gender, sexuality, caste, and ethnicity (McCall 2002).…”

Section: Dialectics Of Visibility and Invisibilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction: Measuring Matters

Pinto¹,

Paidipaty²

2020

History of Political Economy

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

protesters occupied a park in New York's nancial district. The Occupy Wall Street movement, spreading over many cities and several countries over that winter, made inequality its banner and did much to bring the issue to the foreground of public debate. Through a sophisticated combination of age-old protest tactics and social media use, Occupy denounced the injustice of the accumulation of riches and power by a small and unaccountable elite. In that sense, the object of the protests was not novel, but the way it was framed-the 99 versus the 1 percentwas (Gould-Wartofsky 2015; Ramos Pinto 2019).This highly successful slogan is derived from an abstract form of quanti cation of the distribution of incomes, produced by professional economists and statisticians through techniques that are opaque to nonexperts.

show abstract

Section: Dialectics Of Visibility and Invisibilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction: Measuring Matters

Pinto¹,

Paidipaty²

2020

History of Political Economy

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…With reference to the 20 th and 21 st centuries Jerven (2015) has taken up the challenge by investigating the history of measurement for selected countries. Serra (2014) (ILO, 1926(ILO, , 1949(ILO, , 1961Woodbury 1940), even if currently filed under "research agenda for the future". We will return to this issue in Section 7.…”

Section: Household Budgets In Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

On Historical Household Budgets

2016

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The paper argues that household budgets are the best starting point for investigating a number of big questions related to the evolution of the living standards during the last two-three centuries. If one knows where to look, historical family budgets are more abundant than might be suspected. And statistical techniques have been developed to handle the associated problems of small, incomplete, and unrepresentative samples. We introduce the Historical Household Budgets (HHB) Project, aimed at gathering data and sources, but also at creating an informational infrastructure that provides i) reliable storage and easy access to historical family budget data, along with ii) tools to configure the data as it is entered so as to harmonise it with present-day surveys.

show abstract

“…56 In similar fashion, Gerardo Serra has shown how the trial and error of statistical surveys in the British Gold Coast (present-day Ghana) gave shape to the social world. 57 Jerven's research might easily lead to the conclusion that statistical fixes have a long history and embody the exercise of power by a permanently incomplete state. 58 By moving in this direction, the economist would contribute to writing the history of the search for "good economic measures" in Africa, which largely remains to be documented, in connection with the history and sociology of expertise.…”

Section: Toward a Social Analysis Of Numbers In Africamentioning

confidence: 99%

Studying Africa's Large Numbers

Samuel

2016

Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Morten Jerven's work offers a historical perspective on the techniques used by national administrations and international organizations to quantify and analyze the growth of African economies. In his view, the work of statisticians and economists has largely failed to account for national economic and social realities since the beginning of the structural adjustment period. The informalization of economies, the weakness of statistical institutions, and the lack of methodological rigor among international experts have led to the production of statistical fictions. Jerven's analysis calls into question the usual narratives produced by quantitative economic history, such as that of an African economic failure since 1960. It also opens a dialogue with the sociology of quantification, highlighting cases where growth calculations appear arbitrary. However, his methodology suffers from a number of weaknesses. While his earliest works were based on detailed national case studies, Jerven's recent analyses have focused on the critique of continent-wide discourses, in particular international comparisons and econometric studies of growth. His work has thus moved away from a careful ethnography of numbers toward a focus on the denunciation of global practices. This shift prevents the author from making precise reflections on the various roles of numbers in African societies, the multiple positions and modes of action that quantification engages, or the specific historical trajectories which calculations of African growth are supposed to represent.

show abstract

An uneven statistical topography: the political economy of household budget surveys in late colonial Ghana, 1951–1957

Cited by 18 publications

References 18 publications

Introduction: Measuring Matters

Introduction: Measuring Matters

On Historical Household Budgets

Studying Africa's Large Numbers

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About