Trouble with Numbers: Statistics, Politics, and History in the Construction of Weimar's Trade Balance, 1918–1924

Abstract

public discourse that are characteristic of modernity. And there is no area where their dominance is more pronounced than with regard to economic affairs. From as early as seventeenth century, arithmetic was a favorite tool of economic punditry, but it was in late nineteenth and early twentieth century that production of economic data became quasi-industrial.1 States and interest groups constructed systems of economic statistics in form that we know them today, as instruments of real-time observation with a new and reified conception of the economy as their object.2 Clearly history of statistics is intertwined with history of what Michel Foucault termed governmentality.3 However, since they circulated both inside and outside structures of power, role of new data in enhancing governmental capacity, even in a broad Foucauldian sense, was never straightforward.4 At moments of crisis, rather than smoothly tracing course of history, flow of numbers could become a turbulent maelstrom. By early twentieth century, mechanisms of economic reporting were so powerfully developed that they had capacity to swamp political actors with wave upon wave of bad economic news.5