Contents

Introduction: The Changing Fates of the Numerical

Christopher Newfield, Anna Alexandrova, and Stephen John

Part I

Expert Sources of the Revolt against Experts

1. Numbers without Experts: The Populist Politics of Quantification

Elizabeth Chatterjee

2. The Role of the Numerical in the Decline of Expertise

Christopher Newfield

Part II

Can Narrative Fix Numbers?

3. Audit Narratives: Making Higher Education Manageable in Learning Assessment Discourse

Heather Steffen

4. The Limits of “The Limits of the Numerical”: Rare Diseases and the Seductions of Qualification

Trenholme Junghans

5. Reading Numbers: Literature, Case Histories, and Quantitative Analysis

Laura Mandell

Part III

When Bad Numbers Have Good Social Effects

6. Why Five Fruit and Veg a Day? Communicating, Deceiving, and Manipulating with Numbers

Stephen John

7. Are Numbers Really as Bad as They Seem? A Political Philosophy Perspective

Gabriele Badano

Part IV

The Uses of the Numerical for Qualitative Ends

8. When Well-Being Becomes a Number

Anna Alexandrova and Ramandeep Singh

9. Aligning Social Goals and Scientific Numbers: An Ethical-Epistemic Analysis of Extreme Weather Attribution

Greg Lusk

10. The Purposes and Provisioning of Higher Education: Can Economics and Humanities Perspectives Be Reconciled?

Aashish Mehta and Christopher Newfield

Acknowledgments

References

Contributors

Index