Hoos, Ida R. 1912-2007 (Ida Russakoff Hoos, Ida Simone Russakoff)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born October 9, 1912, in Skowhegan, ME; died of complications from pneumonia, April 24, 2007, in Boston, MA. Sociologist and author. Hoos gained prominence as a vocal critic of the exclusive use of mathematical models in making decisions that affected everything from technology to public policy. The daughter of Russian immigrants, she graduated from Radcliffe College in 1933, completed her master's at Harvard in 1942, and later earned a Ph.D. from the University of California in 1959. After graduating from Harvard, Hoos founded the Jewish Vocational Services in Boston, an organization that sought to help Jewish women obtain good employment. She moved with her husband to California and joined the University of California at Berkeley in 1961 as a research sociologist. Here she worked at the Institute of Industrial Relations and then at the Space Sciences Laboratory. She retired in 1982. Concerned about the way technology was overtaking society, Hoos did not agree with the increasing reliance on systems analysis, the method of judging the potential success and safety of a product using mathematical models. Systems analysis became increasingly popular as computers came more in use, but Hoos insisted that deciding whether something such as an airplane was safe just on the basis of math was unwise. There were many other factors one should consider. When she saw that systems analysis was also being employed in policymaking decisions, she was inspired to write her books Systems Analysis in Social Policy (1970) and Systems Analysis in Public Policy: A Critique (1972; revised edition, 1983). Quantitative analysis is never enough, she argued; one must also take into account human and social aspects involved in any decision making. After her husband died in 1979, Hoos moved back to Massachusetts, settling in Brookline.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Los Angeles Times, May 7, 2007, p. B9.

New York Times, May 5, 2007, p. B14.

Washington Post, May 4, 2007, p. B9.