It’s hard to extrapolate feelings out of numbers. Novelists have the luxury (and the skill) to fine-tune phrasing in a way that demonstrates how the same scene can in fact be different. Take this passage for example:
Yes, that was it-the change was there. Before the war at a luncheon party like this people would have said precisely the same things but they would have sounded different, because in those days they were accompanied by a sort of humming noise, not articulate, but musical, exciting, which changed the value of the words themselves. Could one set that humming noise to words?
Virginia Wolf- A Room of One’s Own
But when you see numbers, tabulated-out in sales figures of Rolex sales, income disparities between adjacent countries, or tallies of police arrests- you don’t feel anything. Of all the inputs that go into economic analysis- resources, labor, utilities, transport, and so on, there is no mention of an emotional quantifier.
Yet isn’t at least a portion of why people buy a Rolex due to a feeling? A luxury good makes one stand up a little straighter and beam a little brighter. A luxury good encourages others to treat you with a little more attention. A luxury good may be the ticket to gain entry into a new network of associates. There’s a swarming effect to luxury goods where people are drawn to the aura of the wealthy establishment. At least Kim Kardashian has a billion reasons to think so.
And then there is the opposite effect. The feeling of neglect and secondary status is always in the mix when economic results are released and compared to a strong neighbor. The numbers may divvy out the details of who stands where with what, but the gnawing feeling of being two steps back and half a year behind comes to the surface in casual conversation. “Oh- they are just so brash down there!” Implying, of course, a certain nobility in lower production, further justifying complacency.
Analysis of the cost of policing goes into rows and columns as easily as any set of numbers. But the emotion of seeing your middle school buddy handcuffed and walked out of school doesn’t show up in any way in the numerical representation. How many officers are needed in a community that has memories of one type of public safety is going to be different from another. The expense to leverage community participation in crime-solving is also going to vary. Like groups need to be compared to like groups.
And similarly, when solutions are presented and discussed, time and time again by people outside a community, especially those with elitist inklings, eye-rolling follows disjointed analogies.
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