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

Abstract

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.