As is often the case, I was thinking about George Orwell, and some googling led me to this post from 2005 that had some fun food-related quotes from Bernard Crick’s biography of Orwell, including this:
Just before they moved to Mortimer Crescent [in 1942], Eileen [Orwell’s wife] changed jobs. She now worked in the Minstry of Food preparing recipes and scripts for ‘The Kitchen Front’, which the BBC broadcast each morning. These short programmes were prepared in the Ministry because it was a matter of Government policy to urge or restrain the people from eating unrationed foods according to their official estimates, often wrong, of availability. It was the time of the famous ‘Potatoes are Good For You’ campaign, with its attendant Potato Pie recipes, which was so successful that another campaign had to follow immediately: ‘Potatoes are Fattening’.
Good stuff.
I looked up Crick on wikipedia and it turns out that early in his career he wrote a book that “identified and rejected [the] premises that research can discover uniformities in human behaviour, that these uniformities could be confirmed by empirical tests and measurements, that quantitative data was of the highest quality, and should be analysed statistically, that political science should be empirical and predictive . . .”
Interesting. Too bad he’s no longer around, as I’d have liked to talk with him about this, given how different it is from my own perspective. Crick’s Orwell biography is great, so much so that I’d hope he and I would have been able to find some common ground. He died in 2008, three years after the appearance of the above-linked post, so at least in theory I could’ve tried to reach him and have a discussion of quantitative political science and goats.
Goats?
Follow the link.
I didn’t even know they had a Ministry of Food!
I haven’t read that book, but I read his “In Defence of Politics,” which was published a few years later. It was a long time ago, but as I recall that book said very little about voters, elections, or public opinion. He was interested in political leadership: the idea was that the activity of politicians in negotiating, making deals, deciding whether to compromise or hold the line, etc., was valuable and creative. The “defense” was against the view that in an ideal world, politics would be unnecessary and could be replaced by scientific administration. So my guess he might acknowledge that empirical tests and measurements can illuminate some aspects of politics, but say that they were less useful for understanding the part of politics that he was interested in.
Well he’s definitely wrong!
After all data over the last 50 years of dark-skinned people poring into the US for high paying jobs have forced social scientists to revise their definition of racial discrimination from one based on “phenotype” or “race” to one based on “social construct” or “social outcomes”. Thus a lower GPA of any individual is now evidence that they are of a particular race, since social scientists have learned that race predicts GPA through racism, and it is now clear that people with lower GPAs are victims of racism and people with higher GPAs are beneficiaries of privilege, and their race can be assigned accordingly, since race is now known to be a social construct. So, we know that, with a GPA of 1.33, “Sataya” is black and his GPA reflects the racism that has been perpetrated against him. OTOH, his sister, “Lakshmi”, with a GPA of 3.88, is white and is the beneficiary of Privilege.
Like so many great advances in education driven by social sciences in the past, this great advance will surely improve society, as we can now be sure that Sataya’s genius comes to the fore by boosting his GPA to 3.83, thus allowing him into top universities where his True Genius can flourish. On the other hand, people like Lakshmi, beneficiaries of privilege with very little to offer society will have their GPAs corrected by Machine Learning to reflect their true lack of ability; thus they’ll wind up as 7-11 clerks which, after all the privilege they’ve benefited from, is really about right.
Another great discovery of social sciences – just within the last few years and announced on the world renowned NPR! – by putting cartoon characters on cereal boxes, companies are able to sell more cereal!! This amazing discovery is yet another in the line of Amazing Discoveries in Social Science that give us every confidence that it will continue to improve society as it always has in the past. Thank goodness we have social scientists to help us!! How would we ever survive without their genius?
I think this comment is on a 6 month 7 day delay. At least, I hope it is.
Perhaps Dr. Lehman could contribute as well, to make it the Chip ‘n Dale show, again.
If you haven’t read Rebecca Solnit’s new biography-ish book about Orwell, I really recommend it. “Orwell’s Roses” is the title. It’s about his various forms of engagement with nature, in his life and his writing, and how a writer known for being grim was actually optimistic. It’s Solnit so it’s great reading.
David:
I’m not so much into nature myself, but I like Orwell and Solnit, so maybe I’ll take a look.