The Emergence of Probability (Cambridge Series on Statistical and Probabilistic Mathematic) by Hacking Ian

Author:Hacking, Ian [Hacking, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2006-07-24T00:00:00+00:00

12

POLITICAL ARITHMETIC

Statistics began as the systematic study of quantitative facts about the state. From 1603 the City of London kept a weekly tally of christenings and burials. Desultory records had existed earlier but a desire to know about the current state of the plague made it necessary to set out the figures in a more regular way. Most of the people ‘who constantly took in the weekly bills of mortality, made little other use of them, than to look at the foot, how the burials increased, or decreased; and among the casualties, what had happened rare, and extraordinary, in the week current’. Or so John Graunt [1662] tells us in the preface to his Natural and Political Observations upon the selfsame bills. He and William Petty – whose various essays on ‘Political Arithmetic’ make him the founder of economics – seem to have been the first people to make good use of these population statistics.

Why did no one do so earlier? It is plausible to suppose that inference from statistics evolved slowly because there were few data, but this is not the whole story. It is true that once Graunt had made plain the value of statistics, the capitals of Europe copied London and so data became more ample. For example, Paris started its tabulations in 1667, the year after Petty reviewed Graunt’s book in the Journal des Sçavans [Petty, 1666]. But plenty of data were already in existence. Annuities had been an established method of national or local fund-raising for a very long time. The records of pay-offs from annuity funds provided ample information about the population. There was a good motive to examine this data, namely to determine whether annuities were profitable to own. But no serious analysis of such material was provided before John de Witt made his presentation to the Estates General of Holland and West Friesland in 1671.

Annuity data were most readily available in the Netherlands, but other records had accumulated elsewhere. For example, only in the past few decades have French and then English demographers begun to decode the registers of parish churches. From these ancient volumes we are beginning to know a great deal about population trends in the sixteenth century. They are not as good as a planned census, but they contain much information. We can now use scores of amateur historians to plough through ancient registers; computers vastly speed up the data analysis; but there is nothing new in principle. Individual registers could have been analysed in 1600, but Petty may have been the first person who did this and told us about it, presenting his results to the Royal Society in 1674. The registers had lain unused, silently amassing information, for a century beforehand. ‘All that was needed’, wrote one of the first systematic demographers, J. P. Süssmilch, ‘was a Columbus who should go further than others in his survey of old and well known reports. That Columbus was Graunt [1741, p. 18].’

It is true that demographic knowledge was of less value to a feudal society than an industrial one.

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