The History of Statistics: The Measurement of Uncertainty before 1900

Harvey W. Becher; Stephen M. Stigler

doi:10.2307/1863549

The History of Statistics: The Measurement of Uncertainty before 1900

The American Historical Review ◽

10.2307/1863549 ◽

1988 ◽

Vol 93 (4) ◽

pp. 1019

Author(s):

Harvey W. Becher ◽

Stephen M. Stigler

Keyword(s):

History Of ◽

History Of Statistics

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Making It Count

10.23943/princeton/9780691179476.001.0001 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Arunabh Ghosh

Keyword(s):

Cold War ◽

Statistical Data ◽

New Technology ◽

Political Leaders ◽

Republic Of China ◽

Great Leap Forward ◽

History Of ◽

History Of Statistics ◽

The Government ◽

The Great Leap Forward

In 1949, at the end of a long period of wars, one of the biggest challenges facing leaders of the new People's Republic of China was how much they did not know. The government of one of the world's largest nations was committed to fundamentally reengineering its society and economy via socialist planning while having almost no reliable statistical data about their own country. This book is the history of efforts to resolve this “crisis in counting.” The book explores the choices made by political leaders, statisticians, academics, statistical workers, and even literary figures in attempts to know the nation through numbers. It shows that early reliance on Soviet-inspired methods of exhaustive enumeration became increasingly untenable in China by the mid-1950s. Unprecedented and unexpected exchanges with Indian statisticians followed, as the Chinese sought to learn about the then-exciting new technology of random sampling. These developments were overtaken by the tumult of the Great Leap Forward (1958–1961), when probabilistic and exhaustive methods were rejected and statistics was refashioned into an ethnographic enterprise. By acknowledging Soviet and Indian influences, the book not only revises existing models of Cold War science but also globalizes wider developments in the history of statistics and data. Anchored in debates about statistics and its relationship to state building, the book offers fresh perspectives on China's transition to socialism.

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