Social sciences’ gift to humankind

I

In the mid-1970s a group of physicists and political scientists met at MIT and “arrived at the conclusion that if a World Government was not implemented soon, the probability of a nuclear war before the year 2000 would be close to 100 percent”.

But what were their nuclear war scenarios? Without sample details to evaluate, the experts are like the early astrologer who cast Christ’s horoscope and found the end of Christianity in sight.

II

In the early years of World War I, Rainer Marie Rilke, the poet, wrote that “the misery in which mankind has lived daily since the beginning of time cannot really be increased by any contingency. . . Always the whole of misery has been in use among men, as much as there is, a constant, just as there is a constant of happiness; only its distribution alters.” Here too is the literary all-rounder Jean-Paul Sartre, “essentially, there is not much difference between a catastrophe where 300 or 3000 die and one where ten or fifteen die. There is a difference in numbers of course, but in a sense, with each person who dies, so also does a world. The scandal is the same.”

But the numbers do matter in determining whether or not misery is a constant. “From a statistical point of view, which is that of social and political life and of history, there is an enormous difference,” Maurice Merleau-Ponty said of Sartre’s remark. We know from survey research that conclusions are drawn much more confidently from structured surveys and samples consisting of 3000 people than, say, 30 persons.

I may be misremembering, but I think it was Kenneth Boulding, the early heterodox economist, who thought that the greatest contribution of the social sciences to humankind was the sample survey, as imperfect as it is.