FROM ISSUE NUMBER 135 - SPRING 1999 GO TO TABLE OF CONTENTS
Statistical jargon
ALAIN Desrosières, Administrator of France’s Institut National de la Statistique et des Ẻtudes Ẻconomiques, had the attractive idea of combining a history of the mathematical development of statistics with a history of their use by governments. The result, The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning, † is the kind of book that I would ordinarily recommend as professional reading for today’s quantitative policy analysts. Among its other uses, such a history reminds us how new and immature our profession is. Startlingly few national data were supplied on an annual basis until recently.In the United States, a statistic as basic as the unemployment rate wasn’t invented until the 1930s. Analysts could not track annual changes in family income until the late 1940s.National breakdowns of socioeconomic indicators by race did not become available until the 1950s.
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