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America by the Numbers: Quantification, Democracy, and the Birth of National Statistics

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When the Great Depression struck, the US government lacked tools to assess the situation; there was no reliable way to gauge the unemployment rate, the number of unemployed, or how many families had abandoned their farms to become migrants. In America by the Numbers, Emmanuel Didier examines the development in the 1930s of one such tool: representative sampling. Didier describes and analyzes the work of New Deal agricultural economists and statisticians who traveled from farm to farm, in search of information that would be useful for planning by farmers and government agencies. Didier shows that their methods were not just simple enumeration; these new techniques of quantification shaped the New Deal and American democracy even as the New Deal shaped the evolution of statistical surveys.

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Publisher

: The MIT Press., 2020

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1 online resource

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

9780262357401

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NONE

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Statement of Responsibility

Emmanuel Didier

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Tedy

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Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12008.001.0001

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