ABSTRACT
Fully modern economic reasoning is rational, and rationality puts aside love. One consequence of the emphasis on individual psychology, nation, and the communion between them is corresponding neglect of kinship, community, and religious institutions, and other sources of division and solidarity. Another consequence is that the international is evacuated of social content, at the expense, among others, of people who may find themselves living and working between nations or without recognition by a national government. At the level of the nation, the close alignment of society, population, and nation promoted by this kind of data has authorized the disciplining of households, and hindered migration and transnational kin and community ties. Scales and units of aggregation of data take on troublesome lives of their own. Concepts developed to make consistent data-collection possible become reified as the data itself becomes an argument for their obviousness.
