Partial Orders in Socio-economics: A Practical Challenge for Poset Theorists or a Cultural Challenge for Social Scientists?

In this “position paper” we discuss the potential role of partial order theory in socio-economic statistics and social indicators construction. We maintain that the use of concepts and tools from poset theory is needed and urgent to improve currently adopted methodologies, which often prove ineffective for exploiting ordinal data. We also point out that the difficulties in spreading partial order tools are cultural in nature, and that some open-mindedness is needed among social scientists. We address these issues introducing some examples of open questions in socio-economic data analysis: (i) the problem of multidimensional poverty evaluation, (ii) the problem of assessing inequality and societal polarization, and (iii) the problem of clustering in multidimensional ordinal datasets.