criminalizing youth

[kelley]

the statistical analysis of quaisicausal correlations doesn't capture
"social structure"  demographic stats are about individuals, not social
structres or groups.  they are, rather, models of statistical theory and,
as such, have little to do with social theory.  as such they are complicit
with and produce social engineering knowledge that reproduces the status
quo.  [habermas, fay, etc]  

the approach, then,  is fundamentally at odds with a critical social theory
which focuses on society in terms of the systemic and social relations
which constitute it.  subjects are subjects in relations with others and
with and within forms of social organization.  individuals, that is,
participate in groups, communities, classes, institutions, discourses, etc.

 statistical modeling abstracts individuals from this social context and
creates abstract aggregates of various populations characterized by certain
"variables" thought to be salient.  this has nothing to do with social
structure, again, but statistical modeling.  the only thing captured by
such research  are discrete individuals and their "opinions" or educational
attainment" or "health"  or whatever indicator happens to be popular as a
"trace" of individual behavior and, in turn, it is assumed "social health"
etc.  

moroever, the 'individuals' that compose the "sample" are, by definintion,
independent of one another. etc etc.  by definition, then, they aren't
understood as fundamentally constituted by social relations but only become
objects of investigation by abstracting them from such social relations. 

 there are ways of doing quantitative analysis--mathematical modeling of
social structure--so i'm not providing a blanket condemnation of
statistics/demography.  i have refs from my methods chap if you want them
rakesh, but i am too lazy right now to retrieve them.  let me know.
kelley

At 10:55 PM 9/20/1999 -0400, Rakesh Bhandari wrote:
>Just to restate the point of my last post: there seems to be a resurgence
>of demographic explanations, i.e., those that take the size and/or 
>composition of the population (however it is partitioned in the
>management of populations as statistical objects), to be the fundamentally
>explanatory variable of various social phenomena: secular stagnation from
>declining population growth; social security crisis from a greying and
>more dependent population; anti Keynesianism from a greying population;
>social degeneration from higher reproduction rates of racialized
>populations (with their lower means to which they putatively regress as a
>result of heredity conceived as a natural equilibriating mechanism), etc. 
>I am quite uneasy with explanations of economic, social or
>political phenomena based fundamentally on changes in the size and/or
>composition of the population. But have never thought out what my
>criticism really is. Any suggestions?
>Yours, Rakesh
>
>
>