Poor counts as viable accounts: numbers, forecasting, and routinization in Greece

Soo-Young Kim

Journal of Cultural Economy, 2023, vol. 16, issue 4, 495-512

Abstract: After a revision to a projected deficit figure in 2009 touched off deep recession and austerity, much scrutiny and skepticism focused on the role of economic forecasts, statistics, and experts in the nearly decade-long ‘Greek crisis.’ This article takes an ethnographic approach to macroeconomic forecasting, examining it both as a process through which numbers come to exert profound effects and a charged object of popular concern for the ways in which this happens. It asks how to reconcile the lack of popular faith in forecasts with their ability to persist as objects of attention. Through tracking the making and circulation of forecasts, I answer this question by demonstrating what numbers do. Specifically, I argue that the fundamental work of forecasting consists in how it renders numbers routine means of thinking about the economy and its future. I show how numbers carry out this work through their ability to at once describe and represent, such that contention over descriptions of the economy nevertheless routinizes representations of it. This argument points to a type of performativity that occurs through routinization and it presents an understanding of the multivalence of numbers that can inform critical approaches to quantification, objectification, and expertise.

Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/17530350.2023.2202783 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:jculte:v:16:y:2023:i:4:p:495-512

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RJCE20

DOI: 10.1080/17530350.2023.2202783

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Cultural Economy is currently edited by Michael Pryke, Joe Deville, Tony Bennett, Liz McFall and Melinda Cooper

More articles in Journal of Cultural Economy from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().