I am intending a series of my typically long, elaborate blog posts entitled Math is Democracy. The ideas have been brewing for years although they have been rapidly expanding and taking on new urgency since January. I alluded to this intention previously.
I wasn’t ready to start it yet, but I feel I must. I was reading the oral arguments in Gill v Whitford, the Wisconsin partisan gerrymandering case currently before the Supreme Court. I had to stop and have a moment when I read this:
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Mr. Smith, I’m going to follow an example of one of my colleagues and lay out for you as concisely as I can what — what is the main problem for me and give you an opportunity to address it.
I would think if these — if the claim is allowed to proceed, there will naturally be a lot of these claims raised around the country. Politics is a very important driving force and those claims will be raised.
And every one of them will come here for a decision on the merits. These cases are not within our discretionary jurisdiction. They’re the mandatory jurisdiction. We will have to decide in every case whether the Democrats win or the Republicans win. So it’s going to be a problem here across the board.
And if you’re the intelligent man on the street and the Court issues a decision, and let’s say, okay, the Democrats win, and that person will say: “Well, why did the Democrats win?” And the answer is going to be because EG was greater than 7 percent, where EG is the sigma of party X wasted votes minus the sigma of party Y wasted votes over the sigma of party X votes plus party Y votes.
And the intelligent man on the street is going to say that’s a bunch of baloney. It must be because the Supreme Court preferred the Democrats over the Republicans. And that’s going to come out one case after another as these cases are brought in every state.
And that is going to cause very serious harm to the status and integrity of the decisions of this Court in the eyes of the country.
Now, there’s a lot here one could react to.[1] But the main thing I reacted to was this:
The Chief Justice of the highest court in the land thinks Americans don’t feel empowered to judge an argument on the merits if there’s math involved.
You know what? He’s probably right about that.
But this situation is very, very wrong.
Math is being used increasingly to make decisions governing our lives, for good or ill. Increasingly sophisticated math.[2] The instance most familiar to readers of this blog is probably teacher value-added scores, but the many various uses share this: they are not accountable to the public.
One reason the Wisconsin case is so hot is because the process that led to the map currently being challenged included a lot of fancy mathematical modeling intended to make the Republican legislative majority as bomb-proof as possible — an effort that appears to have worked really well. That the map was drawn with this goal and these tools is not a controversial point in the case. This was a use of math by legislators aimed at becoming less accountable to the public.
What I’m getting at: math is a species of power, and it’s a species that multiple antidemocratic forces are using, very effectively. And it’s a kind of power that citizens, by and large, totally lack.
So, the game is unfair. We the People are supposed to be able to participate in public decision-making. That’s the heart of democracy. But math is increasingly becoming a kind of secret key to power that, if the Chief Justice is right, We the People mostly don’t have. As soon as there’s math involved, we can’t even participate in debates about the very consequential choices that are being made. In which case, nobody who wants to use the power of math (for good or ill!) needs to be accountable to us.
I mean, this was true before the explosion of data-science driven business and governmental practices Cathy writes about, or the computer-assisted 2010-11 legislative redistricting.[3] But now it is more intensely true than ever.
What this leaves me with is that doing our jobs well as math educators is completely urgent for democracy. Every kid we leave traumatized and alienated from formulas and data analysis is a citizen that doesn’t have a voice.
Don’t let anybody tell you it doesn’t matter.
Notes:
[1] For example: This author at ThinkProgress thinks Roberts has a lot of nerve claiming to be concerned with the perception that the court is partisan when he has so consistently voted along partisan lines in landmark cases. This author at WaPo thinks it’s not legitimate for the Court to be considering its public perception in the first place. I am personally inclined to believe that Roberts is earnestly concerned about the court’s reputation and that his question was earnest (mostly because of his surprising and apparently similarly-motivated vote in NFIB v Sebelius), although I do think that the fact that he doesn’t appear to be equally concerned with the perception of partisanship if the court does not “allow the claim to proceed” reflects a rather striking partisan limitation in his image of the “intelligent man on the street.” I know plenty of intelligent men, and women, who would be inclined to conclude that he himself is a partisan hack on the basis of the above quotation alone.
[2] Shout out to Cathy O’Neil.
[3] This seems like a good moment to acknowledge the deep debt of my thinking here to Bob Moses, who has been on this tip for a long time. Also, there is some relationship to the work of math educators in the Freirean tradition such as Marilyn Frankenstein and Rico Gutstein, though I can’t take the time now to figure out exactly what it is.