Transforming Information : The Origin Of Statistics

Abstract

We live in a sea of numbers. surrounded by a culture of statistics—IQs, grade point averages, gross domestic products, batting aver­ages, Dow-Jones Industrial Averages, probabilities of precipitation—it is not easy to imagine a world just awakening to the meaning of numbers. Statistics, in the sense of numbers representing data, first appeared in the eighteenth century and became a regular feature of the cultural landscape in the early nineteenth century. Nothing illustrates better the transformative power of numbers than the changing views of one of the era’s most influential thinkers, Thomas Robert Malthus. Malthus (1766 –1834) will always be remembered for his lapidary statements such as: “Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence only increases in an arithmetical ratio.” This statement sounds mathematical, as if it were a law of nature, yet ominous: “if unchecked,” disaster will surely strike. That is how Malthusians, then and now, have always read it. Malthus wrote these words in 1798 to refute giddy optimists like the Marquis de Condorcet and William Godwin, who believed in the inevitability of progress. Though sincere, he wrote his Essay on Population without benefit of data. It aroused a passionate debate and encouraged the government to undertake the first census in British history in 1801. Armed with census data, Malthus revisited his ideas. He published a second edition in 1803 and, in later years, four more revised editions; they bore the same title but a different subtitle, for they were really a different work: many times longer, full of information, and much more refined. In the course of his life, Malthus changed his thinking about population and subsistence. He no longer predicted an inevitable demographic disaster but instead realized that “in no state that we have yet known, has the power of population been left to exert itself with perfect freedom.” Unlike North Americans and “uncivilized” peoples, Europeans kept their numbers under control by preventive checks, rather than waiting for famines to bring populations in line with the food supply: “An infrequency of the marriage union from the fear of a family . . . may be considered . . . as the most powerful of the checks, which in modern Europe, keep down the population to the level of the means of subsistence.”