"I abhor averages. I like the individual case. A man may have six meals one day and none the next, making an average of three meals per day, but that is not a good way to live"
About this Quote
Averages are the velvet rope that lets inequality stroll in looking respectable. Brandeis, a jurist who spent his career worrying about what modern systems do to actual people, treats the average as a statistical alibi: it smooths out harm until it becomes administratively convenient, morally weightless. The meals example is doing courtroom work. It’s vivid, low-stakes on the surface, and impossible to argue with. Anyone can see the absurdity of calling that person “fine” because the spreadsheet balances.
The specific intent is a warning about governance by abstraction. Brandeis is pushing back against the era’s infatuation with “scientific” management, aggregate data, and one-size-fits-all policy. In law, averages show up as presumptions: the reasonable person, the typical worker, the standard consumer. Those fictions keep courts and bureaucracies moving, but they also erase the outliers who are most likely to be injured by the system. Brandeis is saying: the outlier is not noise; the outlier is often the case that reveals the rule’s cruelty.
The subtext is quietly radical for a judge: justice can’t be outsourced to math. Fairness is distributional, not arithmetic. If your metric can celebrate a life that alternates between feast and starvation, your metric is not neutral; it is complicit. Brandeis’s line lands because it turns a technocratic virtue - objectivity - into a punchline, and then insists we look back at the person who disappeared inside the number.
The specific intent is a warning about governance by abstraction. Brandeis is pushing back against the era’s infatuation with “scientific” management, aggregate data, and one-size-fits-all policy. In law, averages show up as presumptions: the reasonable person, the typical worker, the standard consumer. Those fictions keep courts and bureaucracies moving, but they also erase the outliers who are most likely to be injured by the system. Brandeis is saying: the outlier is not noise; the outlier is often the case that reveals the rule’s cruelty.
The subtext is quietly radical for a judge: justice can’t be outsourced to math. Fairness is distributional, not arithmetic. If your metric can celebrate a life that alternates between feast and starvation, your metric is not neutral; it is complicit. Brandeis’s line lands because it turns a technocratic virtue - objectivity - into a punchline, and then insists we look back at the person who disappeared inside the number.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
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