topics: |  psychology | sociology | physics | science | history | philosophy | consilience

Can there be a quantitative, scientific answer to social questions? This is the question the book seeks to inquire into. It is no doubt an improtant question for all time, and Ball makes excellent inroads into it. This book is an important narrative chronicling the history of the idea, and particularly its progress in recent times, particularly the idea of Game theory (ch. 17) and how it is coming to define social interactions (ch.18). Also traces a number of interesting developments of statistical theories in gas theory and molecular theories of crystals and how these were applied to the stock market (ch.8-9) and in Economics in general, and how opimization analysis can help determine history - e.g. the configuration of nations in WW2 are local minima in a matrix of possible configurations (ch.12

But unlike world-changing books like Jared Diamond's The Third Chimpanzee, the broad canvas is not matched by a finesse in writing that keeps the narrative focused. Nonetheless, an important book for me, full of interesting insights.

Excerpt

Introduction: Political Arithmetick

On the seventh of November 1690 a manuscript [of William Petty's Political
Arithmetick] was delivered to  England's new king, William III.  William
Petty 1623-1687, was professor of anatomy at Oxford... Petty claimed to
prove:

 - That a small Country, and few People, may by their Situation, Trade, and
   Policy, be equivalent in Wealth and Strength, to afar greater People, and
   Territory. And particularly, How conveniences for Shipping, and Water
   Carriage, do most Eminently, and Fundamentally, conduce thereunto. 
 - That France cannot by reason of Natural and Perpetual Impediments, be more
   powerful at Sea, than the English, or Hollanders.
 - That the People, and Territories of the King of England, are Naturally
   near as considerable, for Wealth, and Strength, as those of France.
 - That the Impediments of Englands Greatness, are but contingent and
   removeable.
 - That one tenth part, of the whole Expence, of the King of England's
   Subjects; is sufficient to maintain one hundred thousand Foot, thirty
   thousand Horse, and forty thousand Men at Sea, and to defray all other
   Charges, of the Government: both Ordinary and Extraordinary, if the same
   were regularly Taxed and Raised.
 - That there are spare Hands enough among the King of England's Subjects, to
   earn two Millions per annum, more than they now do, and there are
   Employments, ready, proper, and sufficient, for that purpose.
 - That there is Mony sufficient to drive the Trade of the Nation.
 - That the King of England's Subjects, have Stock, competent, and convenient
   to drive the Trade of the whole Commercial World.  
		(see original text at marxists.org)

[Petty claimed to use numbers to derive these proofs:]
    The Method that I take...is not yet very usual; for instead of using only
    comparative and superlative Words, and intellectual Arguments, I have
    taken the course (as a Specimen of the Political Arithmetick I have long
    aimed at) to express my self in Terms of Number, Weight, or Measure; to
    use only Arguments of Sense, and to consider only such Causes, as have
    visible Foundations in Nature; leaving those that depend upon the mutable
    Minds, Opinions, Appetites, and Passions of particular Men, to the
    Consideration of others: Really professing my self...unable to speak
    satisfactorily upon those Grounds (if they may be call'd Grounds). p.3-4

How dismayed Petty would have been to find that three hundred years later,
political scientists are still lamenting the fact that human affairs
dominated by whim and prejudice rather than led by reason and logic. 4

[Note: Petty was also a major player in the English colonization of
Ireland in the late seventeenth century; his “political arithmetick” was
coupled with what he called “political anatomy”; it led to a prescription,
in his words, of “political medicine” for Ireland. In short, Petty’s
“economics” began as a colonial political strategy that drew on his
background in medicine and experimental natural philosophy. 
 	  - see article by Ted McCormick

Chapter One: Raising Leviathan

[A few decades before Petty, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), then a royalist exile
in France after Charles I's defeat and consequent execution in the English
civil war, sought to find a principled solution to the problems of humankind.]
After
     centuries of monarchical rule upheld by divine and moral imperatives had
     been graphically dismembered with the fall of the ax on Jan 30, 1649
     [when Charles I beheaded, but Ball says nothing more than the above
     sentence, and leaves the reader to founder for details.]

About Thomas Hobbes, the classicist, becoming enamoured of logic, from the
gossipy biography by John Aubrey (1626-1697, a contemporary, in Brief Lives): 

   [He was 40 years old before he looked on geometry; which happened
   accidentally. Being in a gentleman's library, Euclid's Elements lay open,
   and "twas the 47 El. libri I" [Pythagoras' Theorem]. ]
   He read the proposition . "By God", sayd he, "this is impossible:" So he
   reads the demonstration of it, which referred him back to such a
   proposition; which proposition he read. That referred him back to another,
   which he also read. Et sic deinceps, that at last he was demonstratively
   convinced of that trueth. This made him in love with geometry. p.15

Hobbes used Galileo's mechanics to construct a theory of government from
physical first principles.  Motion is the natural state of all things.
The mind is like a calculating machine (Napier had invented one in 1617; 
then Pascal, 1645): 

	When a man Reasoneth, hee does nothing else but conceive a summe
	total; from Addition of parcels; or conceive a Remainder, from
	Subtraction of one summe from another... For REASON ... is nothing
	but Reckoning. p.17

[In Hobbes' view]. The body is merely a system of jointed limbs moved by the
strings and pulleys of muscles and nerves.  Man is an automaton.

Death is immobility, and as part of his inner compulsion, man
"shuns... death, and this he doth, by  a certain impulsion of nature, no less
than that whereby a stone moves downward." 

If men behave in an animalistic manner, showing "a perpetuall and restlesse
desire of Power after power, [ceasing] only in Death," then he will always
seek greater power leading to Hobbes' own frightening vision of a State of
Nature: "continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man,
solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short".  

Thus men will eventually need to cooperate and give up some power to some
authority - it didn't matter much who - he believes in a high degree of
equality among men (rarely voiced in 177th c. Europe p.25).  But the
community elects an individual and confers on him absolute power.  They
will thenceforth defer to him without question.  The ruler could also be a
group (e.g. a parliament) but here power struggles will inevitably arise
within this body.  

In this world, a ruler rules a people who are bound by contract to obey their
sovereign.  [A completely different interpretation of "social contract" from
Locke (1623-1704 or Rousseau (1712-1778).]  The sovereign enfoces unit
through the sword if needed.

A calculus of society p. 28

While from a sociological perspective, Hobbes' ultimate answer - a rigid
dictatorial monarchy - seems anachronistic today, much of his motivation -
particularly his impulse to seek physicalist explanation for social questions
- appears to resonate even today, and contemporary physcists are
beginning to adapt their methods to answer these questions.  One
    could chart te trajectory of Hobbes's thought via Locke to later thinkers 
    who believed there could be such a thing as a "calculus of society"

The path passes through Bentham's utilitarianism (leading, unlike Hobbes, to
a democracy).  This line of thinking paved the way for the socialism of Marx,
who in his own way, sought a "scientific" political theory, one that was
strongly (and misguidedly) influenced by Darwinism. 

Carolyn Merchant, in The death of Nature (1983), argues that the rise of
mechanistic, atomistic philosophy in the 17th c. sanctioned the manipulations
and violations of nature that continue to blight the world today. -31 
[a similar view is espoused in J.D. Bernal and other left-leaning historians
of science; Bernal was himself influenced by 
Nikolai Bukharin and Boris Hessen, who gave an influential Marxist
account of the work of Isaac Newton (at the famous 1931 meeting on History
of Science).  In
1939, Bernal published The Social Function of Science, probably the earliest
text on the sociology of science.

Ch. 2: Lesser Forces p. 33

This chapter develops thermodynamics, second law, Maxwells kinetic theory
of gases; detours through various models for molecular explanation of gas
behaviour, including Brownian motion, discovered by John Brown, who, as a
botanist, first observed pollen grains dancing wildly under the
microscope, and attributed it to some "active force" of life. But even
"dead" grains danced, and also fragments of the Egyptian sphinx.  Einstein
supposed that the tiny grains were small enough to be deflected by
(imbalanced) collisions w individual molecules of water, and his paper was
the first thorough treatment of diffusion, and several predictions were
verified in a series of very precise expts by Jean Perrin in 1908 [won NP
1926]. (p. 43-44)

Opening quotes

Nature, it seems, is the popular name
for milliards and milliards and milliards
of particles playing their infinite game
of billiards and billiards and billiards.
   - Atomyriades, a "grook" by Piet Hein

     Piet Hein philosopher, mathematician, designer, scientist, game
     inventor, author - was a Danish polymath (1905-1996) and inventor of a
     form of poetry called 'Grook' ("gruk" in Danish) - small aphoristic
     verses revealing in a minimum of words and with a minimum of lines some
     basic truth about the human condition. [started appearing in the daily
     paper "Politiken" starting 1940.]
     Piet defined art as a way of thinking about all subjects... He asserted
     in his philosophical writings that the great cultural divide was not
     between the haves and the have-nots, but between the knows and the
     know-nots. - see http://www.archimedes-lab.org/grooks.html

The Boltzmann is magnificient. I have almost finished it.  He is a
masterly expounder. I am convinced that the principles of the theory are
right, which means that I am convinced that in the case of gases we are
really dealing with discrete point masses of definite size...  - Einstein,
1900.  p. 33

Boltzmann's statistical mechanics - makes Maxwell's theory watertight, and
also explains why certain processes may be irreversible, as in the second
law. p.45

[Ball's language here is despairingly non-technical: the probability that
all the particles in an inflated baloon would go to one half of it, thus
deflating the other half - is possible in physics, but the probability os
"so tiny that it is hard to distinguish from zero."  Carl Sagan would have
used "billions and billions here, but perhaps we deserve some numbers,
some time. - AM]

3: The law of large numbers: Regularities from randomness

	It can be stated without exaggeration that more psychology can be
	learned from statistical averages than from all philosophers, except
	Aristotle. - Wilhelm Wundt (1862)

	Taken in the mass, and in reference both to the physical and moral
	laws of his existence, the boasted freedom of man disappears ; and
	hardly an action of his life can be named which usages, conventions,
	and the stern necessities of his being, do not appear to enjoin on
	him as inevitable, rather than, to leave him to the free
	determination of his choice. - John Herschel 1850

Marquis de Condorcet (b.1743, guillotined 1794) : If there is indeed a
science of human affairs, with its own axioms and laws, then it must be a
statistical science. 54 

Thomas Paine was exiled to France after publishing The Rights of Man. 55
[in yet another loose end, you don't find why in Ball - the book opposed the
idea of hereditary rule - and hence the legitimacy of kings, a topic then
much exercising Britain, after the French revolution. ]

Statistical science: Born in the humanities

Maxwell, after reading Henry Thomas Buckle's History of Civilization in
England, which used statistical analysis of group behaviour: 
    Those uniformities which we observe in our experiments with quantities
    of matter containing millions and millions of molecules are uniformities
    of the same kind as those explained by Laplace and wondered at by Buckle
    arising from the slumping together of multitudes of causes each of which
    is by no means uniform with the others.

The very name, statistics originated from the attempt to apply
quantitative studies to social phenomena. In 1749, Gottfried Achenwall of
Germany suggested the word referring to quantitative study societal states.
That was when summaries like death rates, birth rates and other population
measures were coming about. 

other reviews

Kirkus Reviews: 
Can human nature be reduced to a set of laws that can then be used to
organize society? By this intriguing account, many a physicist is now
exploring such a question.  Apply a law to individual humans, and you'll
likely end up with more exceptions than rules. But perhaps, suggests British
science writer Ball (The Ingredients, 2003, etc.), the terms haven't been
correctly expressed: human nature is more a collective than an individual
matter, so the task is to describe the workings of the crowd, such that "we
can make predictions about society even in the face of individual free will."
Opening his inquiry with Thomas Hobbes, who proposed a mechanistic model of
humankind in his much-despised Leviathan, Ball touches on some unsettling
questions: Are we merely drones in a big hive? Is there such a thing as free
will?  (Probably: Ball points to "many examples of social behavior in which a
kind of regularity and order comes not from any predestination in the fates
of the participants but from the very limited range of their viable
choices.")  Writing with his customary light hand, and drawing on very recent
developments in things like chaos and network theory, Ball looks at some of
those examples to see what scientists think about why we do the things we
do. Why, for instance, are there traffic jams? (Because the universe is rife
with anomalies and random perturbations.) Why do economic systems—the stock
market, say—resist behaving in always predictable ways? (Ditto, and "the
fluctuations are unavoidable.") Why do wars erupt, and why do some wars stay
small and manageable while others kill millions? (Ditto, and therefore "there
can be no telling how big a conflict might be sparked by the smallest
disturbance.") Ball's survey raises more questions than it answers, but one
fascinating constant emerges: "Regardless of what we believe about the
motivations for individual behavior, once we become part of a group we cannot
be sure what to expect."A highly provocative work of popular science.

---
blurb:
% Are there “natural laws” that govern the ways in which humans behave and
organize themselves, just as there are physical laws that govern the motions
of atoms and planets? Unlikely as it may seem, such laws now seem to be
emerging from attempts to bring the tools and concepts of physics into the
social sciences. These new discoveries are part of an old tradition. In the
seventeenth century the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, dismayed by the impending
civil war in England, decided that he would work out what kind of government
was needed for a stable society. His solution sparked a new way of thinking
about human behavior in looking for the “scientific” rules of society. Adam
Smith, Immanuel Kant, Auguste Comte, and John Stuart Mill pursued this idea
from different political perspectives. But these philosophers lacked the
tools that modern physics can now bring to bear on the matter. Philip Ball
shows how, by using these tools, we can understand many aspects of mass human
behavior. Once we recognize that we do not make most of our decisions in
isolation but are affected by what others decide, we can start to discern a
surprising and perhaps even disturbing predictability in our laws,
institutions, and customs. Lively and compelling, Critical Mass is the first
book to bring these new ideas together and to show how they fit within the
broader historical context of a rational search for better ways to live. 

--
from http://www.cs.unm.edu/~aaron/blog/archives/scientifically_speaking/index.htm