Political discussions today aren't always very rational, but they often incorporate numbers. When people discuss the economy, health care, or climate change, sooner or later they will bring up statistics.
It wasn't always like that. Our habit of using numbers to make political arguments has a history, and William Dillinger is a leading authority on that history. Indeed, in recent years Dellinger, an associate professor in MIT's Science, Technology, and Society Program (STS), has carved out a unique niche through scholarship that shows how quantitative reasoning has become part of social life. did.
In his award-winning 2018 book, Calculated Value (Harvard University Press), Dillinger explores the key points in British public life from the 1680s to the 1720s, when the habit of talking about numbers took hold. I have determined the time. This trend is closely related to the following trends: Parliamentary power and the rise of political parties. Importantly, freedom of the press has also expanded, giving politicians and the public the ability to openly discuss the world as it is, supported by empirical evidence.
Dillinger's second book project is underway, under contract with Yale University Press, and further explores the idea of financial discounting, a concept from his first book. This is a calculation that estimates how much money (or other things) in the future is worth today and assigns a “present value” to those future objects. Some skilled mathematicians understood discounting in the Middle Ages. Its use expanded during his 1600s. Today, this is very common in the financial industry and is the subject of debate in the context of climate change, as experts try to estimate the ideal level of spending on climate issues.
“This book is about how this particular method came to have the power to influence deep societal issues,” Dellinger said. “This is fundamentally about compound interest, and it's at the heart of the most important global issue we have to face.”
Numbers alone do not make the discussion rational or useful. They can be false, misleading, or used to lock in profits. Indeed, a key theme in Dillinger's work is that as quantitative reasoning becomes more powerful, the question becomes why and to whose benefit? In this sense, his research is consistent with the Institute's long-standing and always-relevant approach of his STS faculty of thinking carefully about how technology and knowledge are applied in the world.
“The broader culture has become attuned to STS, whether it's conversations about AI and algorithmic fairness, climate change or energy, which are both technical and social issues at the same time.” Dillinger says. “As I teach undergraduates, I find that recognition at MIT is growing more and more,” said Dellinger, who received tenure from MIT earlier this year for both research and teaching. .
dig deep and work outwards
Dellinger has focused on these topics since his days as an undergraduate at Harvard University.
“I found myself really interested in the history of economics, the history of practical mathematics, data, statistics, and how so much of our world came to be organized quantitatively. ” he says.
Dillinger wrote his college thesis on how England measured the land it had seized from Ireland in the 1600s, and after graduation he worked in the financial sector. This provided further opportunities to think about the application of quantification to modern life. .
“It wasn't something I wanted to do forever, but I found it to be a really interesting space for some of the conceptual questions I was interested in, the social life of computation.” Dillinger says.
He returned to academia with a PhD in the history of science from Princeton University. In his first year of graduate school, Dillinger found in the archives his 18th-century pamphlet on financial calculations for the value of stocks involved in the infamous speculation case known as the South Sea Bubble. It became part of his doctoral thesis. South Sea Bubble skeptics were among the first prominent voices to bring data into public debate. It also influenced his second book.
But Dellinger first earned his doctorate from Princeton University in 2012, then spent three years as a Mellon postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University. He joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty in 2015. The institute turned his doctoral thesis into a book called “Calculated Values.'' The book won his 2019 Oscar and Kensher Award for Best Book from the Indiana University Center for Eighteenth Century Studies. Co-recipient of the 2021 Joseph J. Spengler Award for Best Book of the Society for the History of Economics.
“My method as a scholar is to dig into the technical details and then work outward from there historically,” Dellinger says.
long chain of history
Even as Dillinger was writing his first book, the idea for a second book was taking root in his mind. The South Sea Bubble brochure he discovered while attending Princeton included intermittent discounts in its “calculated value.” Dillinger was intrigued by the art of discounting 18th-century figures.
“What I thought was a very modern technology seemed to be well known to many people in the 1720s,” he says.
At the same time, conversations with academic colleagues in philosophy revealed how different conclusions about discounting are being debated in climate change policy. He soon decided to write a “biography of calculation'' on financial discounting.
“I knew my next book had to be about this,” Dillinger says. “I was very interested in the deep roots of the history of discounting, and it has a lot of urgency right now.”
Dellinger said the book will include material on the financing of British cathedrals, the heavy use of discounts in mining during the Industrial Revolution, the resurgence of discounts in policy circles in the 1960s, and climate change. In each case, he carefully looks at the benefits and historical dynamics behind the use of discounts.
“For people who regularly take advantage of discounts, it's like gravity. It's clear that being rational means discounting the future according to this formula,” says Dellinger. “But if you look at history, what is considered rational is part of a very long historical chain of people applying this calculation in different ways, and over time… That's the way things are done. I'm very interested in deconstructing the idea that this is more like a timeless rational calculation than a product of this interesting history.”
Dellinger said his work at STS helped him connect numerous historical periods into one book about the different ways discounts have been used.
“I don't know if following books that span the 17th to 21st centuries would have been something I would have done in any other context,” Dellinger says. He is also quick to credit his colleagues at STS and other programs for helping create an academic environment in which he could thrive.
“I came in with a really great group of other scholars at SHASS,” Dellinger said, referring to the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. He joins fellow STS colleagues Robin Scheffler, historian Megan Black, and historian Kayleigh Horan, who along with Dellinger has taught graduate school on the concept of risk in history, who won tenure last year. It lists people who have done so. Overall, Dellinger said, the institute was the perfect place for him to pursue interdisciplinary research on technological thought in history.
“I work on things that are very old and very technical,” says Derringer. “But at MIT, I found that people from all walks of life were cheerful and welcoming when they heard about my interests.”