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In honor of the impending (already started in some states) USA ballot count, a short thread on all the times nation states have rapidly and accurately counted large amounts of anything... https://twitter.com/MathHistFacts/status/1323334774543523843
That's it. That's the thread. There are no examples.
Now a slightly longer add-on to the thread about why this is a historically significant question...
Now a slightly longer add-on to the thread about why this is a historically significant question...
In some ways, counting large numbers of things is the defining problem of organized societies, dating to antiquity. Some of the oldest surviving records are attempts to count things at some sort of scale.
Historically, large counts of things have most often been for economic or (military-)political purposes: inventories of things to tax, censuses of people to conscript, votes for some reason.
Every history thread I do that goes back "to the beginning" includes @Eleanor_Robson 's book and this is no exception. https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691091822/mathematics-in-ancient-iraq
See also this essay I learned about from Robson, by Reviel Netz, on counting and Athenian democracy: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/2002HisSc..40..321N
See also this essay I learned about from Robson, by Reviel Netz, on counting and Athenian democracy: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/2002HisSc..40..321N
Historically, counting has been essential to organized societies, but that doesn't mean it has been easy, quick, or accurate, and usually rough counts have been enough.
The problem of characterizing and eventually quantifying things important to a nation state gave rise to the science of Statistics, whose history is all about compromises nations have had to get fast-enough and accurate-enough counts. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674009691
As historians of political quantification, censuses, etc. have repeatedly shown, as the organizational scale of large counts grows, so too does the sociopoilitcal challenge of coordination, meaning inevitable tradeoffs in speed, accuracy, and the epistemology of what is counted.
Two more book recommendations:
@profwernimont https://covid-19.mitpress.mit.edu/numbered-lives
@danbouk https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/H/bo20298894.html
@profwernimont https://covid-19.mitpress.mit.edu/numbered-lives
@danbouk https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/H/bo20298894.html
When time is of the essence, political values become counting values and vice versa, as @guo_xuguang 's new book powerfully shows https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691179476/making-it-count
As @murphyatglad argues in The Economization of Life, fantasies of what can be countable have defined not just nation states but global economics, politics, and the question of whose lives count https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-economization-of-life
Indeed, historians have shown time and again that a defining feature of modernity is not so much the ability to count things well but the ability to imagine things to be countable, combined with all the compromises and contradictions that follow in practice.
(Side-note: these fantasies have been so central to what it means to be modern/civilized that corresponding ideas about counting small numbers have been used to define the opposite: https://twitter.com/MBarany/status/1293214147069513728?s=20 )
There are lots of well-studied examples of attempts to manufacture a rapid-enough / accurate-enough count that have had major unintended negative consequences for nations: balance of trade, GDP, public opinion polling, migration rates, crime stats,....
A few more people on twitter who have written about these: @wmmuigai @ashleystreet @WilliamDeringer @mathbabedotorg @mikey_mcgovern @mccormick_ted
Moral of the thread is: if you suspect there's something deep and endemic to modern society about all the ongoing and forthcoming chaos and controversy around vote counting, you're onto a whole vibrant field of history with lots to read and think about! /end
