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Encontro Nacional de Produtores e Usuários de Informações Sociais, Econômicas e Territoriais FO AÇAO PARA UMA SOCIEDADE AI III Conrerência Nacional IV Conferência Nacional de Geogr afia e Cartografia de Estatí s tica Re união de Institui ç ões Produtoras Fór um de Usuários Seminário "Desafios para Repensar o Trabalho" Simpósio de n o v a ç õ e s J o rn a d a d e Cursos Mostra d e Tecnologias de Informação 27 o 31 de maio de 1996 Rio de Janeiro, RJ BRASIL 60 anos 1936-1996 Uma das maneiras de olhar o ofício de produzir informações sociais. econômicas e territoriais é como arte de descrever o mundo. Estatísticas e mapas transportam os fenômenos da realidade para escalas apropriadas à perspectiva de nossa visão humana e nos permitem pensar e agir à distôncia. construindo avenidas de mão dupla que juntam o mundo e suas imagens. Maior o poder de síntese dessas representações. combinando. com precisão. elementos dispersos e heterogêneos do cotidiano. maior o nosso conhecimento e a nossa capacidade de compreender e transformar o realidade. Visto como arte. o ofício de produzir essas informações reflete a cultura de um País e de sua época. como essa cultura vê o mundo e o torna visível. redefinindo o que vê e o que há para se ver. No cenário de contínua inovação tecnológica e mudança de culturas da sociedade contemporônea. as novas tecnologias de informação - reunindo computadores. telecomunicações e redes de informação - aceleram aquele movimento de mobilização do mundo real. Aumenta a velocidade da acumulação de informação e são ampliados seus requisitos de atualização. formato - mais flexível. personalizado e interativo - e. principalmente. de acessibilidade. A plataforma digital vem se consolidando como o meio mais simples. barato e poderoso para tratar a informação. tornando possíveis novos produTos e serviços e conquistando novos usuários. Acreditamos ser o ambiente de conversa e controvérsia e de troca entre os diferentes disciplinas. nas mesas redondas e sessões temáticas das Conferências Nacionais de Geografia. Cartografia e Estatística e do Simpósio de Inovações. aquele que melhor ensEja o aprimoramento do consenso sobre os fenômenos a serem mensurados para retratar a sociedade. a economia e o Territóílo nacional e sobre as prioridades e formatos das informações necessórias para o fortalecimento da cidadania. a definição de políticas públicas e a gestão político - administrativa do País. e para criar uma sociedade mais justa. Simon Schwartzman Coordenador Geral do ENCONTRO Promoção Fundação Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística IBGE Fundação Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatistica IBGE Associação Brasileira de Estudos Populacionais ABEP Co-Promoção Associação Brasileira de Estatística ABE Associação Brasileira de Estudos do Trabalho ABET Associação Brasileira de Pós-graduação em Saúde Coletiva ABRASCO Associação Nacional de Centros de Pós-graduação em Economia ANPEC Associação Nacional de Pós-graduação e Pesquisa em Ciências Sociais ANPOCS Associação Nacional de Pós-graduação e Pesquisa em Geografia ANPEGE Associação Nacional de Pós-graduação e Pesquisa em Planejamento Urbano e Regional ANPUR Sociedade Brasileira de Cartografia SBC Apoio Federação das Indústrias do Estado do Rio de Janeiro FIRJAN Academia Brasileira de Letras ABL Conselho Nacional de Pesquisas CNPq Financiadora de Estudo Pro) tos FINEP Institutos Regionais Associados Companhia do Desenvolvimento do Planalto Central CODEPLAN (DF) Empresa Metropolitana de Planejamento da Grande São Paulo S/A EMPLASA (SP) Empresa Municipal de Informática e Planejamento S/A IPLANRIO (RJ) Fundação Centro de Informações e Dados do Rio de Janeiro CIDE (RJ) Fundação de Economia e Estatística FEE (RS) Fundação de Planejamento Metropolitano e Regional METROPLAN (RS) Fundação Instituto de Planejamento do Ceará IPLANCE (CE) Fundação João Pinheiro FJP (MG) Fundação Joaquim Nabuco FUNDAJ (PE) Fundação Sistema Estadual de Análise de Dados SEADE (SP) Instituto Ambiental do Paraná IAP (PR) Instituto de Geociências Aplicadas IGA (MG) Instituto de Pesquisas Econômicas, Administrativas e Contábeis IPEAD (MG) Instituto do Desenvolvimento Econômico Social do Pará IDESP (PA) Instituto Geográfico e Cartográfico IGC (SP) Instituto de Apoio à Pesquisa e ao Desenvolvimento "Jones dos Santos Neves" IJSN (ES) Instituto Paranaense de Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social IPARDES (PR) Processamento de Dados do Município de Belo Horizonte S/A PRODABEL (MG) Superintendência de Estudos Econômicos e Sociais da Bahia SEI (BA) 3 Organização Coordenação Geral Simon Schwartzman Comissões de Programa Confege Confest César Ajara (IBGE) José A. M. de Carvalho (UFMG) Denizar Blitzkow (USP) José Márcio Camargo (PUC) Jorge Marques (UFRJ) Lenildo Fernandes Silva (IBGE) Lia Osório Machado (UFRJ) Teresa Cristina N. Araújo (IBGE) Mauro Pereira de Mello (IBGE) Vilmar Faria (CEBRAP) Speridião Faissol (UERJ) Wilton Bussab (FGV) Trento Natali Filho (IBGE) Comissão Organizadora Secretaria Executiva -Luisa Maria La Croix Secretaria Geral-Luciana Kanham Contege, Contest e Simpósio de Inovações Anna Lucia Barreto de Freitas, Evangelina X.G. de Oliveira, Jaime Franklin Vidal Araújo, Lilibeth Cardozo R.Ferreira e Maria Letícia Duarte Warner Jornada de Cursos -Carmen Feijó Finanças -Marise Maria Ferreira Comunicação Social-Micheline Christophe e Carlos Vieira Programação Visual- Aldo Victorio Filho e Luiz Gonzaga C. dos Santos Intra-Estrutura -Maria Helena Neves Pereira de Souza Atendimento aos Participantes -Cristina Lins Apoio Andrea de Carvalho F. Rodrigues, Carlos Alberto dos Santos, Delfim Teixeira, Evilmerodac D. da Silva, Gilberto Scheid, Héctor O. Pravaz, Ivan P. Jordão Junior, José Augusto dos Santos, Julio da Silva, Katia V. Cavalcanti, Lecy Delfim, Maria Helena de M. Castro, Regina 1. Fonseca. Rita de Cassia Ataualpa Silva Tal éI S, w,/uk Registramos ainda a colaboraç-o d t nl o dtis (JI'('!('II! \. áreas do IBGE. com seu Irabéllllo. CII!I it', ( '.u(jP'.! (I', Pdl I 011,011 j,lÇ.tO Jo plOjl !o (lo lN, N IRO . . \ Conferencia 31 C 31 AS ESTATisTICAS E AS CIENCIAS SOCIAlS Conferencista: PETER WAGNER Statistics, social science and democracy 'Reliable statistics are a major cornerstone of democracy.' It seemed appropriate to me to open this presentation witil a quote from tile current head of tile Office of National Statistics of tile country which I now live in, tile United Kingdom. TIm Holt was appointed in July 1995 not least to oversee a major reorganisation of tile statistical services of Great Britain and to. as it was perceived, restore public confidence in statistics. This seemed particularly necessary after a period of some fifteen years during which the government had repeatedly interfered with tile workings of tile statistical services. against tile advice and protest of the professional association. tile Royal Statistical SOCiety. and had, for instance, revised the criteria for a person being counted as unemployed several dozen times in such a way tilat unemployment appeared to be declining steadily. As a result, numbers are no longer trusted in tilis country. to use Ted Porter's apt phrase. and an arduous task certainly lies ahead of Tim Holt.1 But why should tile public have confidence in statistics? 'There are three types of lies: lies. damned lies, and statistics.' It was tile novelist and member of Her Majesty's Parliament Benjamin Disraeli. who liked to cite tilis one of Mark Twain's aphorisms. Yet, he also liked to use statistics to underpin his political views, not least his notion of the division of England into 'two nations'. rich and poor. And it was an offiCial of Her Majesty's governments, Winston Churchill, who described in 1911, tilen Home Secretary, on the occasion of the passing of the British National Insurance Act. the use of statistics for elaborating early social policy insurance as 'bringing in tile magiC of average to tile aid of tile millions'. 2 So, despite all cynicism, there seems to be some legitimate concern for trust in numbers, and there seems to be some relation between statistics and politics. In this presentation, I shall try to explore some aspects of tilis relation by means of a brief historical inquiIy. The aporia of social knowledge under conditions of modernity Statistics is a particular kind of social knowledge, and democracy is a particular kind of political order. To understand the way they are linked we shall first have to look more generally at the ways knowledge and politics are related. I shall start my observations with some reflections on the period which, Simultaneously, is often regarded as the period of tile naissance of tile modern social sciences and as tile onset of political modernity; the late eighteenth and early nineteeth century, the period of tile American and French Revolutions and tileir aitermatil. One should tilink tilat it could hardly have been a coincidence tilat botil tile modern political order and tile modern order of knowledge of tile social world emerged at about tile same time. 11beodore M. Porter, Trust in Numbers, The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life, Princeton: Prince ton University Press, 1995. 2 As quoted by Peter Flora and Arnold J. Heidenheimer. The historical core and changing boundaries of the welfare state', in Peter Flora and Arnold J. Heidenheimer (eds). TIle Development ofW elfare States in Europe and America, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books. 1981. p. 19. 1 At first sight, though, instead of an obvious correspondence between the orders of knowledge and of politics we rather find a paradox, or at least an apparent paradox. Certainly, the early social sciences were peJVaded by political concerns. They followed up on, and went along with, the earlier politic~ philosophy of liberalism; and they tried to underpin those kinds of reasoning with explicit reflections on human nature and on the question if and how human nature would lend itself to a political order without externally imposed unity and rules of action. However, there appears to be something politically odd about those discourses. Early sociologists were - normatively - taking the stance of liberalism in a veIY broad sense, namely defending the right of human beings to self-determine their individual and social lives. They were arguing at the same time, though, that the free action of human beings would not actually generate. as one might innocently assume, a very wide range of possible individual and social forms and orientations of behaviour. They seemed to hold that human beings, given complete autonomy, would reveal themselves not to be free in a radical sense, but driven by a limited number of well intelligible inclinations. One might even infer that it was exactly this predictability and order that gave strong reasons to support the normative project of liberty. This linkage of freedom and predictability became particularly important in the historical moment when the externally imposed barriers to free deliberation were to be removed, the moment of the American and French Revolutions. These revolutions gave political and institutional expression to a broader culture of individual autonomy which is a key element of modernity. In this sense, much of this era can be seen as a liberation of human beings from imposed ties and, thus, also as an increase of contingency and uncertainty in the lives of human beings. One should expect that a philosophy of contingency linked to a liberal individualist political theoIY would dominate the intellectual scene forever after the successful revolutions. However, historically this was not at all the case. Instead a reasoning emerged which assumed that the actions of human beings were somehow shaped and controlled by forces beyond their immediate and conscious reach. Political thought declined, and in its place the social sciences arose. 'Society' as the object of the social sciences has rather been a 'postrevolutionary discoveIY'; or, to put it even more succinctly. 'the sociological point of view constitutes itself in the moment when the notion of liberty becomes the principal articulation of the human world. ,3 What appears here as a paradox in fact reveals the aporia of social knowledge after liberation. VeIY generally speaking, the social sciences are to be regarded as a part of the response human beings gave to their new condition of - self-inflicted, one might say - contingency and principled uncertainty. Being unable to rely any te 3 Pierre Manent, La ci de l' homme, Paris: Fayard, 1994, pp. 75 and 113. I have dealt with this issue in more detail in Certainty and order. liberty and contingency. The birth of social science as empirical political philosophy. The Rise of the Social Sciences and. the Formation ofM odernity, ed. by Johan Heilbron. Lars Magnusson and Bjorn Wittrock, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996 (SOCiology of the Sciences Yearbook. vol. 20. forthcoming). longer on externally defined certainties, social philosophers started searching, sometimes almost desperately, for regularities and continuities which exist without being commanded. The social sciences have been a means to decrease contingency. Statistics and the political problematique of modernity Let me then take a brief look at the form of this social science. It inherited from political philosophy the problem of the political order. But after the liberating revolutions, there to be little left to say about it. A liberal order should be intrinsically satisfactory, theoretically speaking. At the same time, many European thinkers did not believe that that would actually be the case; they looked for grounds that would make the new order sustainable. The remaining optimism of the late Enlightenment hoped for the new sciences to provide such grounds. The hope and aspiration was that the moral and political sciences should and could now achieve 'the same certainty' as the 4 physical sciences. Certainty was a requirement of some urgency, since the new political order needed assurances of its own sustainable functioning. But it was also regarded as an histOrically new possibility, since political action was liberated of the arbitrariness of deciSions by rulers of doubtful legitimacy and given into the hands of the multitude of reason-endowed human beings. The 'blend of liberalism and rationalism', which Keith Baker observed in the convictions of Condorcet, the founder of social mathematics,5 can thus be explained as stemming from the 6 same source, the Enlightenment linkage of freedom and reason. The rights-endowed individual became thus, in such views, the only conceivable ontolOgical as well as the methodological foundation of a science of political matters after the revolutions. Once the rights of man had been generally accepted as self-evident and unalienable, it seemed obvious, to Turgot and Condorcet for instance, that they were also 'the logical foundation of the science of society.,7 On the basis of this assumption two avenues of constructing a science of the political had opened. One possibility was to try to identify by theoretical reasoning the basic features of this unit of analysis, the individual human being, and its actions. Since it was conceived as an ontolOgical starting-point, devoid of all specific, historical and concrete, ties to the world. its characterization was to proceed from some inherent features. From earlier debates, those features had often been conceived as twofold, as paSSions and as interests. In the late Enlightenment 4 Keith Michael Baker. Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 1975, p. 197. See also Eric Brian, La. mesure de l'£tat. Administrateurs etgeometres auXVII,te siecle, Paris: Michel. 1994. 5 Baker, op. cit., p. 385 6 While it is common to draw on French examples to make this point. Italian statisticians were no less outspoken. Participants in the struggle for a liberal-democratic society with representative institutions in mid nineteenth century, Correnti called statistics the 'discipline of democracy', and Messedaglia nemaed it 'the discipline with a representative character'; for the context see Peter Wagner, Sozialwissenschaften und Staat, Frankfurt/M: Campus, 1990, p. 94. 7 Baker. op. cit., p. 218. 3 context, the rational side of this dichotomy was regarded as the one amenable to systematic reasoning, as intelligible so as to allow the building of a scientific approach to the study of at least one aspect of human interaction with the world, namely the production and distribution of material wealth. While political economy was based on a highly abstract. but for the same reasons extremely powerful, assumption of human rationality. the other conclusion from the individualist foundational principle was possibly even more reductionist but much more cautious. Avoiding any substantive assumptions on the driving forces in human beings at all. the statistical approach. often under the label of political arithmetic, resorted to the collection of numerically treatable information about human behaviour. The space of substantive presuppositions was radically emptied in this thinking, but the methodol1ical confidence in mathematics seemed to have increased in inverse proportion. Thus, two strands of political thought that had been proposed and elaborated for some time rose to new and greater prominence, political economy and political arithmetic. The denominations these approaches were known by in the late eighteenth centwy referred explicitly to political matters. Both were to lose these attributes in the nineteenth centmy when they had consolidated their ways of proceeding and when the application of these cognitive forms had established predominance over political deliberation in decision on common matters, at least in the view of many economists and statisticians. Mostly, this terminological change has been interpreted as an autonomisation of cognitive approaches and as a differentiation of the sciences into diSCiplines. However, it is not exactly true to say that economics and statistics separated from politics. Once the approaches of the former two are accepted as Valid. there is nothing political left to study_ 9 Now, these were certainly not the only approaches to the study of the post revolutionary social world. And all others, like cultural. structural or historical sociologies. including Marxism, can indeed be read as criticisms of such an individualist foundation of social science. However, almost all of social science can be understood as responses to a quest for certainty, in the sense in which I outlined it above; it has in common both the search for, and the claim that there are, identifiable determinants of human action. Three basic ways of elaborating this claim have been proposed. They were initially formulated around the turn to the nineteenth century, became somewhat codified and formalized about a century later, and were widely adopted after the Second World War. In the first approach, full reign is given to the individual human beings, but they are endowed with rationalities such that the uncoordinated pursuit of their interests will lead to overall societal well-being. In the second approach, individuals are of little interest. No one will command their activities, but those are in fact, behind the individuals' backs, subject to societal laws or cultural imprints. These two kinds of detenninistic reasoning make for a very peculiar couple in the sense that the one locates the determinant completely inside the human beings, and the other one 8 BIian, op. eit; Alain Desrosieres, La. politique des grnnds rwmbres. Histoire de la raison statistique, Paris: La Decouverte, 1993. 9 This is exactly Hannah Arendt's cIitique in TIle Human Condition, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958. 4