America by the numbers : quantification, democracy, and the birth of national statistics / Emmanuel Didier ; forward by Theodore M. Porter ; translated by Priya Vari Sen.
Introduction: America's Reflexivity -- Part 1: The Decomposition of America -- The America of the Reporters -- The Decomposition of Links Between Statistics and Politics -- Part 2: Expression of Random America: On the Rural Front -- From the Political Representative to Statistical Representativeness -- Probable Error -- The Administration and University -- Areal America -- Part 3: Expression of Random America: On the Urban Front -- The Paradoxical Decomposition of Unemployment -- How to Transform the Victims of the Depression into Enumerators? -- From Participationism to a Government of the Masses.
Summary:
"This is a title in the Infrastructures series and it is a translation from the French (it was published in France by la Decouverte in 2009). It is a look at the infancy of agricultural and labor statistics in the US in the 1920s and 1930s. On the face of it, this seems like a dry topic, but it was written with an eye toward giving life and detail to the growth and development of statistics and quantification in the US. Didier shows that the data collected was used in very real wasy to help everyday Americans improve their livelihoods and forges a more cohesive American economy and identity. The author charts the National Agricultural Statistical Services (and successive government organizations such as the Bureau of Crop Estimates, the Division of Markets, etc.) early attempts at gathering and making sense of agricultural data. In his study, Didier links methods of surveying (and sampling the population) with different ideals of democracy and of public participation. Little has been said of the role agricultural surveys played in the shaping of statistics and survey data in the US-more attention has been paid to the urban side of this story. Ted Porter, who wrote the foreword, wrote of this book in his initial review: "One more very appealing dimension of this book is its friendly, close-to-the-ground presentation of the work of statisticians. He develops this material not as a theoretical working-out of general survey strategies, but as a series of practical tactics developed to deal with specific problems arising in the course of the work. This makes the book much more readable and interesting to someone not specifically devoted to statistical methodologies, and is also, in my view, more faithful to how things really unfolded."-- Provided by publisher.
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