Configuring the World: A Critical Political Economy Approach Richard T. Griffiths
本书批判性地审视国际政治经济学和发展领域中的量化指标，揭示将抽象理念转化为可衡量指标时的问题，鼓励对政策分析中常见数字保持怀疑。
Quantifiable targets and aggregate performance indices have proliferated in the policy world in the past decades, propelled by increasingly more sophisticated statistical techniques and analytical tools. Within fields such as international political economy and international development, such metrics have become essential tools for assessing, monitoring and comparing economic as well as social and political progress across countries—influencing what Merry (2016) has called an ‘indicator culture’. However, as Richard Griffiths remarks in his new compelling and accessible textbook, ‘Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts’ (p. xx). In Configuring the World, Griffiths critically surveys scholarly debates about various themes in international political economy and development and seeks to illuminate the issues that arise from attempting to translate abstract and normative ideas into quantifiable metrics. In dissecting population count and gross domestic product (GDP) figures or complex aggregate indices such as the Human Development Index (HDI), the author’s objective is not to repudiate the exercise of quantification entirely but rather to encourage greater skepticism of numbers that have become commonplace in policy-making and analysis. In this vein, the book emphasizes two core messages. The first is that the quality of statistical data cannot be taken for granted and varies widely across countries. Quality suffers not only from data collection constraints, particularly in less developed countries, but also from biases in the construction of different measures. These limitations hamper our ability to derive conclusions or infer causal relationships. The second message is that scrutinizing different metrics and deconstructing them help us understand how they inform—or, in Griffiths’ own terminology, ‘configure’—policies. He argues that such an exercise is essential for enabling us to envision new ways of reassembling or conceptualizing constitutive components with the goal of changing—or ‘reconfiguring’—the world.