Dry statistics / real lives

To get a good sense of how real lives are really lived, of what it is really like to be poor or old or disabled, we read novels or biographies, social histories or social commentaries. We read Charles Dickens' Hard Times (1854) or George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) or John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1963); we read Jane Addams' Twenty Years at Hull House (1919) or Michael Harrington's The Other America (1962) or The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965). Any of these offer far more evocative accounts than we social scientists can ever hope to muster out of the dry statistics which are our stock in trade.

Inept though we may be at evoking the real lives of social unfortunates, social scientists are nevertheless relatively good at counting how common each of those patterns of social misfortune actually is in any given society. That is a crucial step in transforming ‘personal troubles’ into ‘public issues’ (Mills 1959, ch. 1; Gibson 1998, ch. 1). Ever since the days of Charles Booth's magisterial sixteen-volume study of Life and Labour of the People in London (1892–1903) and Seebohm Rowntree's study of York (1901; 1941), social reformers have been keenly aware that it is as essential to enumerate instances of social distress as it is to describe them evocatively.