About

The book

The Greatest Shortcoming traces a hundred years of American demographic and environmental governance — from the Olmsted Report's grammar of scarcity to climate triage as administrative routine. It identifies the actors who built the instruments, the organizations that circulated them, the metaphors that made them persuasive, and the political projects they served. And it asks whether measurement can be redirected: whether the same quantitative tools that narrowed the circle of concern can be rebuilt to widen it. draft

The book addresses four scholarly communities whose debates converge on the problem it analyzes: science and technology studies, critical and historical demography, environmental sociology and political ecology, and extremism studies and the sociology of far-right movements. The full statement of how the book speaks to each of them is in the preface.

The author

Brian C. Keegan is a computational social scientist trained as a mechanical engineer, then in quantitative communication studies, with detours through political science and business. He works in the discipline of misfit toys known as information science, studying digital traces of social behavior from online communities like Wikipedia, Reddit, and Twitter. This book is a return to his STS undergraduate roots after almost two decades in the theories and methods of other disciplines. draft

Contact

For questions about the manuscript, talks, or reviews, please reach Brian via the brianckeegan GitHub profile. A formal contact address will appear here once Brian provides one for public listing. draft

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments will appear here as the manuscript advances.