A census, or official enumeration of people, is as old as officialdom for the good reason that it is a precursor for officials raising taxes on people or their property. According to Luke, a taking of a census was the reason Joseph and Mary found themselves in Bethlehem. Although they lived in Nazareth, Joseph belonged to the House of David and Bethlehem was the place the house was counted.
The US Constitution puts the taking of a census very high, with Article 1 requiring one a decade. Although section 1 calls it an enumeration, section 9 provides “the Census or enumeration herein before directed”.
To the modern eye, the world of Joseph and Mary on 0AD and the world of Philadelphia politicians of AD1787 do not greatly different. Or more correctly their differences do not come near their one
similarity, each being pre-industrial.
The process we loosely call the industrial age has involved many things. One thing is the change in our view of time and space. Prior to the age, most of us lived out our lives in the one village or city
where time’s repetition was marked out by four seasons. Mobility and immediacy has given the modern human an irrevocably different parameter.
The industrial age has also changed our idea of the census and the reason for it. Of course it still serves its primary role of enumeration. But it is also something very different, and there is a very industrial age explanation. The explanation is that the shifts in time and space were producing bucketloads of data capable of capture and use in the form of “statistics” and the census was an excellent source of capture. The 1790 census sought enumeration of free whites by age and gender, the number of “all other persons” and, separately, the number of “slaves”. By the time of the 1910 census, after more than a century of rapid industrial growth, the information sought was different and much more detailed.
What is both curious and unsurprising is that while the mathematics we associate with statistics had good lineage, it was only upon the eve of industrialisation, as the politicians were deciding things in Philadelphia, that the word entered our language. Sir John Sinclair, the editor of The Statistical Account of Scotland 1791-1799 would later observe:
Many people were at first surprised at my using the words ‘statistical’ and ‘statistics’, as it was supposed that some term in our own language might have expressed the same meaning. But in the course of a very extensive tour through the northern parts of Europe, which I happened to take in 1786, I found that in Germany they were engaged in a species of political enquiry to which they had given the name ‘statistics,’ and though I apply a different meaning to that word — for by ‘statistical’ is meant in Germany an inquiry for the purposes of ascertaining the political strength of a country or questions respecting matters of state — whereas the idea I annex to the term is an inquiry into the state of a country, for the purpose of ascertaining the quantum of happiness enjoyed by its inhabitants, and the means of its future improvement; but as I thought that a new word might attract more public attention, I resolved on adopting it, and I hope it is now completely naturalised and incorporated with our language.
“Lies, damn lies and statistics” has been attributed famously by Mark Twain to Benjamin Disraeli. There is no firsthand evidence for
this. The earliest version I can find is a letter to the [English] National Observer dated 8 June and published 13 June 1891:
Sir, – It has been wittily remarked that there are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a ‘fib’, the second is a downright lie, and the third and most aggravated is statistics.
How many witty remarks had been made is a matter for statistics. Oddly enough, the very next article in the publication is a review of a biography of Disraeli who had died a decade before.
That said, one of the most profound features of social communication – and therefore politics – is the way in which “the truth” is used to justify “the cause”. The “considered use of widely available information” may or may not be “a blatant manipulation of data”, depending on whose vote one is trying to get.
In 2018 the American Statistical Association waded into an eternal debate in the US in the following terms:
Drawing Voting Districts and Partisan Gerrymandering: Preparing for 2020 – A Statement endorsed by the American Statistical Association and the Council of the American Mathematical Society
Good luck to them. Whether Gerrymandering – hard “G” please – is better regarded as bipartisan is moot. For its part, the Association picked up this relatively new word and formed itself in Boston on 27 November 1839, the year the city’s Morning Post recorded “O.K.” as okay.
If statistics is the means by which a state measures, it is unsurprising that statistics are both a means and an ends of how the state measures itself. Statisticians are often at the forefront of social
theories, with the result that relationship between the equations “Bad science, therefore bad morals” and “Bad morals, therefore bad science” can become a very difficult one to examine.
Many statisticians of the 19th and early 20th century were at the forefront of eugenics, a popular and esteemed area of study which is now unpopular and debunked by the esteemed.
Sir Francis Dalton, a half-cousin of Charles Darwin, was a founder of eugenics. While not the origin of his species he is regarded as the origin of the expression “nature v nurture”. This is kind of true but
pertinently not. His 1874 lecture to the Royal Society was called “On Men of Science, their Nature and their Nurture”. It is a patently statistical analysis whose purpose is
to specify the chief qualities by which the English men of science of the present day are characterized, to show the possibility of defining and roughly measuring the amount of any of those qualities, and to conclude by summarizing the opinions of the scientific men on the merits and demerits of their own education, giving an interpretation of what, according to their own showing, they would have preferred.
Galton’s enduring work Hereditary Genius was published on 27 November 1869.
Statistics and democracy have travelled hand in hand as data is formulated and reformulated. The success of the industrial revolution has brought further revolutions and we are now in the midst of
what we are pleased to call the Third Industrial Revolution aka the Digital Revolution.
Data may still be a means but it is, in economic terms, a true ends where corporations which dwarf the titans of earlier ages exist solely to mine, to manufacture and to sell data. At the core of this process is the computer program. Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s only legitimate daughter, is commonly but not universally touted as the world’s first computer programmer. She died on 27 November 1852.
