Of Telescopes and Footprints – Indicators, Statistical Observation and Political Perception

While at the Max-Planck I primarily work on two cases studies. The first one, on the Traum vom Umweltraum, studies the “eco-space” approach that has been proposed by economists and civil society actors since the late 1980s as a way to “operationalize” sustainable development. The second case study, Pareto’s limestick, considers statistics on personal income distribution, which were first used used by Vilfredo Pareto so as to debunk socialist egalitarian concerns with what he understood to be a scientific demonstration of inequality, but which nonetheless strongly influenced egalitarian political philosophy in the second half of the 20th century. The two case studies are part of my dissertation, preliminarily entitled “Visions need accounts”, which examines political perception and its complicated relation to statistics.